Metropolitan Acoustics — Seamless app migration to cloud

From on-prem app to SaaS

Metropolitan Acoustics, an architectural acoustics consulting firm, wanted to move its on-prem application to the cloud with minimal disruption to performance and existing architecture. It also wanted to launch the new solution as a SaaS product – SenSV. Our AWS experts completed the migration in just four weeks, creating an affordable solution within the estimated budget.

Our work involved

• AWS Pricing Estimation
• AWS IoT Core, ECS, EC2, and S3 storage
• On-Prem to Cloud Migration
• FleetHub Device Management

Impact

• Secure Cloud Infrastructure
• Scalable SaaS Application

<$200 AWS bill4 weeks: migration completion

Founded by Felicia Doggett, Metropolitan Acoustics provides sound and vibration monitoring services across several industries in the US. With over 3000 successful projects over 30 years, its clients include Du Pont, SAP, Siemens, and LiveNation.

In recent years, Metro Acoustics has received several projects from the life sciences sector. Spatial acoustics are vital for laboratories as even a minor vibration can influence sensitive equipment. Many new labs are opening near city centers, making sound monitoring essential for accurate results.

This led Metro Acoustics to develop SenSV, a hardware and software environmental monitoring device for laboratories. SenSV measures ambient vibration in buildings to determine their suitability for various lab functions.

Problem: software scalability

SenSV’s existing software application was hosted on an on-prem server connected directly to the Raspberry Pi IoT device. While this worked well and displayed real-time health metrics and vibration indicators, the solution wasn’t scalable, especially as Metro Acoustics planned to launch SenSV as a SaaS product.

Therefore, Metro Acoustics teamed up with Modus Create to migrate the application to the cloud without disrupting its existing architecture. Additionally, the team wanted to ensure the final cloud solution costs less than $200 per month in infrastructure expenditure.

On-prem to cloud migration

The project started with a discovery phase where the team reviewed SenSV’s existing architecture and use cases and created a plan to complete the migration in four weeks.

Next, the team created SenSV’s cloud architecture framework based on Metro Acoustics’ performance and budgetary requirements. We used the AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate the monthly cost of the final solution, which came down to less than $200 per month.

Once the architecture was approved, our DevOps engineers set up AWS environments and migrated the application components to the staging environment. We held daily standups with the Metro Acoustics team and shared real-time progress using Jira, reducing the need for follow-ups and status updates. This ensured that the entire application was migrated in less than two weeks.

Felicia Doggett, Founder of Metro Acoustics (source: technical.ly)

UAT and post-migration support

Post-migration, the developers from Modus Create and Metro Acoustics conducted extensive user acceptance testing (UAT) to review different use cases and validate expected outputs.

The team decommissioned old environments after fixing the errors discovered during the UAT. We then shared documentation and cloud infrastructure access with Metro Acoustics. The team continued to respond to real-time feedback and monitor performance issues.

Finally, we set up Fleet Hub device management for SenSV, which helps developers build standalone web applications to monitor the health of device fleets. We shared recommendations on indexing devices, device shadowing (offline state management), and job configuration for device updates.

With Fleet Hub, Metro Acoustics can manage common fleet-wide tasks and remediate operational and security issues.

Impact: scalable SaaS product

Metro Acoustics now has a cloud-based, secure, and scalable SaaS solution ready for launch. It is already making revenue from the prototype and has received a $50,000 grant from the JVS Fund. The cloud infrastructure costs are under $200 per month, well within the estimated budget at the start of the project.

The team migrated SenSV from on-prem to the cloud without making major changes to the codebase, creating a seamless transition for the engineers at Metro Acoustics.

Vital stats

• <$200 Monthly AWS bill
• 4 Weeks Migration duration

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