Pole Star Global works with Steamhaus to power reliable, agile maritime solutions on AWS
Pole Star Global needed to modernize its application environment to reduce risk and increase operational efficiency. Working with Steamhaus, the organization moved critical applications to AWS. As a result, Pole Star ensures 99.99% uptime, releases updates and features daily instead of annually, and deploys application environments in minutes instead of hours.
• 99.9% uptime for criticalcustomer applications
• 30-50% expected costsavings
• Multiple daily releasesinstead of one per year
• 15 minutes instead of 12hours to deploy newenvironments
Seeking to reduce inefficiency and risk
Pole Star Global, founded in 1998, is a leader in maritime intelligence and vessel tracking that focuses on reducing risk and optimizing trade efficiency. The company’s solutions help customers manage vessel registration and safety, routing, performance and sanctions, and cargo tracking, port arrivals, and illicit behavior identification. Over the years, the organization had accumulated a sprawling infrastructure with multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts and legacy systems including an on premises VMware application environment.
This led to cost inefficiencies and security vulnerabilities, creating an urgent need for a new technology platform.“We had some risk in our existing setup, and we knew we needed to modernize our applications for agility and resilience,” says Tim Durmush, director of DevOps, PoleStar Global. To meet this requirement, Pole Star knew it had to retire its legacy systems and fully exit its on-premises data centers. “We want to save money, fix security, modernize all the applications, and then get to a point where we can do zero downtime deployments,” says Durmush. To achieve these goals, Pole Star sought to collaborate with a technology company that has deep AWS expertise and a proven track record in cloud modernization.
Modernizing applications and automating deployments
Pole Star found what it was looking for with Steamhaus, an AWS Partner that specializes in helping companies migrate business-critical applications to the cloud.Pole Star selected Steamhaus because of its ability to bridge commercial and technical relationships with AWS and customers, experience in designing best-practice cloud architectures and managing complex migrations, and collaborative approach. “Our role is to ensure that the migration not only meets technical requirements but delivers real business value,” says Katie Chamberlain, AWS Business Development Manager, Steamhaus.
Working alongside the Pole Star team, Steamhaus led a multi-phase engagement including a detailed assessment phase including a thorough discovery of applications, workloads, and deployment processes and an architecture design phase to focus on modernization and future-proofing. Steamhaus also managed the full migration from thePole Star on-premises environment to an AWS Landing Zone, emphasizing a containerized environment using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) andAmazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) rather than a simple lift-and-shift, to ensure greater flexibility, scalability, and operational efficiency.
Steamhaus also helped Pole Star implement AWS Lambda for serverless compute,Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for scalable storage, Amazon RelationalDatabase Service (Amazon RDS) for managed database services, and AWSCloudFormation for a template-based infrastructure as code environment. Pole Star also uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for securely controlling access to AWS resources. Together, these AWS services enable Pole Star to modernize its application stack, automate deployments, and enhance security posture. Pole Star also took advantage of the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), a program that provides tools to reduce costs and accelerate migration projects.
Ensuring high availability and speeding deployments with a modernized solution
By working with Steamhaus to fully modernize its application environment, Pole Star was able to decommission legacy systems, which will likely to lead to 30–50 percent infrastructure cost savings. The new environment also helps Pole Star ensure 99.99 percent uptime for its applications, 24x7.
“We do business with banks and governments, so high availability is not optional for us,” Durmush says. “One of our critical applications is our ship security alert system, which sends ship position reports every 30 minutes. It has to be up and running all the time so the message gets to the right person at the right time, and AWS enables us to do that.”
Pole Star has also increased its operational agility by modernizing on AWS, and it can now support continuous delivery and rapid innovation. “Our modernized AWS environment allows us to build resilience into our systems and simplify deployment so we can head towards our goal of zero downtime deployments,” says Durmush.
A sustained partnership
Previously, the company deployed key updates once a year. Now, Pole Star can release updates and enhancements multiple times per day and it can deploy new application environments in15 minutes instead of 12 hours. “By modernizing on AWS, we’ve moved away from a sort of 1990s waterfall methodology and into the 21st century. Accelerating our deployments on AWS frees up our product team to focus on innovation and experimentation without having to wait for permission,” says Durmush. “We can keep our customers and our business happy because we’re releasing more products.”
Pole Star plans to continue working with Steamhaus to modernize and optimize its application environments on AWS and complete work on an AI-powered data lake based on Amazon Bedrock.
“Our engagement has been great so far, and we’re looking forward to building out our strategic relationship together in the next few years,” Chamberlain says.
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