Sharestates’ smooth transition to AWS infrastructure delivers improved user experience and optimizes operations

How we helped

Sharestates chose AWS for its cost-effectiveness, industry adoption and redundancy capabilities. Rackspace Technology connected Sharestates with an AWS representative early on, enabling the company to secure AWS funding and cost savings.

Rackspace recommended a single-phase migration, allowing the transition to be completed over a weekend without downtime. Using the Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS (LZA), the Rackspace team deployed a secure and compliant landing zone in less than two weeks, providing a solid foundation for Sharestates' AWS environment.

The migration team utilized various tools and services, including AWS Application Migration Service and proprietary scripts to efficiently migrate Sharestates' 3TB of data across 11 servers, ensuring a smooth and secure transition.

During the migration process, Rackspace identified and addressed potential vulnerabilities by implementing proper security groups, network access controls and monitoring to safeguard sensitive data. It also upgraded outdated and unsupported database versions, refactoring database schemas and queries to resolve compatibility issues.

Using infrastructure-as-code, Rackspace efficiently deployed a consistent infrastructure within the landing zone set up by the LZA. The team leveraged managed database services to provide automated backups, patching and monitoring, delivering a reliable and scalable environment for Sharestates' databases.

One significant upgrade was the migration of the Maria DB instance on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which optimized Sharestates' database performance, resulting in faster speeds and improved performance for extensive reports and large data pulls. Rackspace performed the migration by writing custom scripts to transfer the data.

"Once we did the migration, we felt this was the right 'next step' because we wanted to just build a foundation the right way," said Davoodi. "With the Rackspace team recommending it and our internal tech teams agreeing that it's the right time to do it, we then decided to move it, upgrade it, optimize it."

The move has simplified the deployment of new services and infrastructure for Sharestates, as many third-party providers build systems and APIs specifically for AWS, enabling faster integration and the development of new features.

"After the optimization, we realized that things were going a lot faster, and many of the reporting problems that we were experiencing from time to time were resolved," Davoodi said. "It improved not only our internal experiences but also the external experiences for our users."

Sharestates now relies on Modern Operations to provide post-migration support for its internal team. “It is helping our internal team to know that there’s somebody there to rely on in case we can’t figure it out,” said Davoodi. “That allows us to keep pushing and then know that we can always come back for guidance if necessary.”

These enhancements positioned Sharestates favorably within the financial technology community, particularly in terms of integrating third-party tools and developing new features that could provide a competitive edge.

"Our goal has always been to connect investors and borrowers in a streamlined process,” Davoodi said. “Looking ahead, this move is going to allow us to take our platform to a mobile environment, keep up with our competitors' technology and stay at the forefront of the commercial real estate lending industry."