Zilverline is developing Jortt by using AWS Technology

Jortt is a user-friendly digital accounting package developed for entrepreneurs with entrepreneurs! Jortt is directly linked to your financial activity whether it be through your bank or an application such as Mollie or Payt.

Traditional accounting operations are fully automated, allowing a user to organise their financial affairs with no previous experience in accounts. This innovative method allows Jortt to focus entirely on the future.

Zilverline has developed this accounting software from scratch, harnessing the very latest technology and a clear interface. This technology has a real impact on the convenience and experience of the Jortt user. In Scrum sprints of 1 - 2 weeks, Zilverline, together with the product owners of Jortt, develops new features so that it increasingly meets the wishes and requirements of users.

Growing pains and PCI compliance

Since the start of Jortt the application was hosted in the Cloud. Due to the exponential growth of Jortt there was a need to take the current infrastructure to the next level. Another reason for migrating the infrastructure was due to Security requirements imposed by the Dutch National Bank (DNB) in order to get the PSD2 license.

Selection process of new Cloud provider

At the end of 2018 a comparison between various Cloud Providers was made in order to meet several requirements like:

Maintainability
It should be easy to add or change servers in our infrastructure. At Zilverline we regard our infrastructure as code. All infrastructure related tasks are automated using Terraform and Ansible. Although both Terraform and Ansible provide support for many Cloud Providers, the support for AWS is the most extensive.

Security
In order to meet the requirements set out by the DNB several things needed to be implemented like strict separation of environments (production, test) and the highest level of security requirements of the infrastructure. With the AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and the Amazon Inspector, AWS provides great support for implementing these requirements.

Cost
Since Jortt was still in the startup phase, cost was an important requirement. All Cloud Providers gave a good insight into the cost. Using the Simple Monthly Calculator from Amazon a very detailed forecast can be made. Zilverline was able to provide a pretty accurate cost forecast. Amazon was not the cheapest choice, but certainly not the most expensive.

Zilverline has selected AWS as new Cloud Provider for Jortt

Having taken all factors into account, including, but not limited to, Maintainability, Security and Cost, Amazon Webservices came on top. Aside from these factors, the maturity and feature richness of AWS platform were crucial to our decision.

Migration to AWS

When Zilverline started the migration at the start of 2019 the infrastructure consisted of: web-, background-, websocket- and (master/slave) database servers. Next to the servers AWS services like cloudfront and s3 were used, but in a different Amazon account. By first creating a complete Staging environment in AWS the migration could be tested thoroughly. Due to the excellent integration with Ansible and Terraform the infrastructure was easily reproduced to the Production environment. Within approximately 2 months Zilverline completed the entire migration of the Jortt application resulting in a:

• Completely automated infrastructure using Terraform and Ansible.
• Virtual Private Cloud for Staging.
• Virtual Private Cloud for Production.
• Log Aggregation and alerting using CloudWatch.
• Automatic security assessment using Amazon Inspector.
• Dashboard for monitoring state of AWS services using Grafana.

Benefits

In addition to the aforementioned benefits gained from migration to AWS, Jortt also saw a performance improvement of approximately 30%, and over time an increase in uptime due to Amazon’s impeccable service.