Carguero: Azure to AWS Cloud Migration increased transport efficiency Brazil’s Agro-tech industry

About Carguero

Carguero is a joint venture transportation company developed by four leading agricultural companies operating in Brazil: LDC, Maggi, Cargill and DM Brasil. With the downloadable Carguero application at the forefront, the company was designed to transform the Brazilian freight transportation industry by making it more intelligent, transparent and accessible to all. 

Carguero’s app displays specific and up-to-date freight information enabling truck drivers to choose the freights they deliver based on price, distance, and company. The app’s intention was to give drivers more autonomy and control over their schedules and income. Once released, the app was downloaded by more than 100K users and had a reach of 40% of the Brazilian Agribusiness market.

The Business Challenge

Due to the nature of the transportation and agricultural industries, the Canguero platform requires high availability 24×7, especially during peak farming seasons such as the soybean harvest. If the platform is unavailable at any time throughout the day, truck drivers may miss information about ​​late-night freight, leading to shortages in work and transport.

Despite Canguero’s infrastructure existing in the cloud, they experienced frequent problems with performance, downtime, and reduced ability to quickly recover from failures throughout 2021. The combination of which resulted in the application being constantly unavailable and ultimately a 15% reduction in their driver base. As a consequence, Carguero companies saw a negative impact on their supply chains and revenues, which also disrupted their plan to invite more agricultural companies to join the app.

Migrating from Azure to AWS

Assess Phase

DNX Solutions engaged with Carguero to find out why such issues were occurring and how best to remediate them. The DNX team began by undertaking a Rapid Discovery, creating a Cost Report, and attending briefings with Carguero’s key stakeholders to gain an overall understanding of the current situation. This assessment enabled DNX to identify gaps along all six dimensions of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework: business, process, people, platform, operations, and security. In addition, DNX gained valuable insight into Carguero’s business, capabilities, infrastructure and objectives, all of which was taken into account when developing a business case. The business case assisted Carguero in the decision-making process, ultimately leading to an Azure-AWS migration with the aims of meeting their business growth goals and fixing existing issues with disponibility.

A number of items were included in the comprehensive migration plan, such as:

• Identification of the applications to be migrated and/or modernised
• Identification of the Data & Storage to be migrated and/or modernised
• Security and compliance requirements
• Design of the Operation Model
• Lite Total Cost of Ownership Overview
• Identification of key risks under each of the 6 AWS pillars, including their severities
• Creation of risk-mitigation roadmap

Mobilise Phase

To start off the Mobilise Phase, the business case was refined and an operating model was layered. The team prioritised which applications were to be migrated, and defined the type of migration strategy to be proposed. The accepted strategy was developed based on the application complexity of Carguero’s existing infrastructure, environment priority, and business criticalities. 

The next step in the Mobilise Phase was to deploy DNX’s Well-Architected cloud foundation, Citadel. By using Citadel, an automated, secure, and compliance-ready infrastructure-as-code (IaC), Carguero could have peace of mind knowing their foundation was strong and secure. After deploying Citadel, the DNX team built a proof of concept by migrating a small number of applications, involving the client in the process, increasing their understanding and ensuring knowledge on best cloud practices is shared. Once the pilot migrations were completed, the Migration Phase could begin.

Migration Phase

To de-risk the project and maintain Carguero’s confidence at each step, the migration was performed in a phased approach. With a strong focus on application optimisation, DNX always considers the client needs and circumstances before proposing a particular platform be deployed on top of Citadel, be it Fargate, Kubernetes, Lamidus, Datalake, and Databreaks. To keep costs under control and give long-term value to the client, DNX first migrated Carguero’s database before optimising the RDS MySQL database. Finally, the 25 Kubernetes EKS applications were modernised and migrated into Citadel, ensuring Carguero to benefit from AWS cloud from the very start.

AWS Services Used

• EKS
• RDS 
• ALB 
• WAF 
• SSO
• GuardDuty 
• Elastic Cache Redis 
• ECR
• Route53
• CloudFront
• Lambda
• ACM
• S3
• CloudTrail

Outcome and Next Steps

As a result of the modernisation and migration of Carguero’s application and data, the company reached its goal of 99.9% disponibility for its application. This led to a 20% increase in the number of users, improving the responsiveness and resiliency of the Brazilian agro-companies that are part of Carguero. With the environment structuring in IAC, Carguero’s team was able to replicate development environments, resulting in a significant increase in application releases. The DNX team is now working on a disaster recovery project for Carguero, to further strengthen their application in the cloud.