Case Study - Transforms TelSmart's VoIP Platform for Expansion Through Cloud-Native Migration

Overcoming Infrastructure Limitations for International Growth

TelSmart, a rapidly growing Belgian VoIP telephony provider, offers a digital care platform that enables small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to easily digitize their corporate telecommunications through an intuitive, user-friendly interface. As a successful scale-up with thousands of customers across Belgium, TelSmart had set its sights on European expansion.

However, TelSmart's ambitions were increasingly constrained by their on-premises infrastructure:

• Scalability Constraints: Their exponential customer growth was putting enormous pressure on existing systems, threatening service quality.
• Operational Burden: The maintenance and management of physical infrastructure required increasingly intensive labor and specialized resources.
• Geographic Limitations: VoIP solutions demand minimal latency for quality service, which would have required establishing and maintaining physical infrastructure in each new market.
• Cost Inefficiency: Their existing infrastructure scaled linearly with costs, making expansion financially challenging.

TelSmart recognized that overcoming these challenges required more than simple cloud hosting—they needed a complete replatforming strategy that would maintain their core telephony systems while transforming components not optimized for cloud environments.

Collaborative Cloud-Native Transformation

Necko Technologies recognized that TelSmart's migration presented unique challenges that required a specialized approach. VoIP telephony systems have distinctive requirements—they need direct connectivity to physical telephone operators while maintaining extremely low latency and high availability.

We implemented a collaborative strategy with three key pillars:

1. Knowledge Transfer and Skill Building

Before diving into technical implementation, we conducted extensive training sessions with TelSmart's development team:

• Delivered comprehensive training on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles
• Provided hands-on workshops focused on AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)
• Established DevOps best practices for continuous deployment and monitoring

2. Architectural Assessment and Design

We conducted a thorough assessment of TelSmart's existing architecture to identify:

• Components suitable for direct migration to AWS
• Systems requiring refactoring for cloud optimization
• Elements needing complete redesign as cloud-native applications

Based on this assessment, we designed a hybrid architecture that addressed TelSmart's unique requirements:

• Created a network architecture using AWS Transit Gateway to maintain secure connections with physical telephone operators
• Categorized system components based on scalability requirements:
  • Static components with consistent resource needs
  • Dynamic components requiring elastic scalability
• Designed separation of concerns between application tiers while maintaining performance

3. Implementation with AWS Best Practices

Our implementation followed AWS Well-Architected Framework principles:

• Operational Excellence: Implemented comprehensive CloudWatch monitoring, alerts, and dashboards
• Security: Designed multi-account structure with strict IAM policies and network segmentation
• Reliability: Built redundancy across availability zones with automatic failover
• Performance Efficiency: Optimized component placement for latency reduction and cost management
• Cost Optimization: Implemented auto-scaling policies and right-sizing guidance

Blending Traditional and Serverless Technologies

The architecture we designed for TelSmart intelligently combined traditional infrastructure with modern serverless components to address the unique requirements of VoIP services:

Physical Connectivity Layer

• Established dedicated Direct Connect links to telephone operators
• Implemented AWS Transit Gateway to securely share network connections across multiple AWS accounts
• Created a multi-account strategy with dedicated networking, production, and development environments

Core Telephony Infrastructure

• Migrated critical telephony components to highly available Amazon EC2 instances with reserved capacity
• Implemented containerization of compatible services using Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate for improved density and management
• Designed intelligent traffic routing to minimize latency based on customer geography

Dynamic Service Components

• Refactored appropriate services to leverage serverless architecture with AWS Lambda
• Implemented event-driven architecture using Amazon EventBridge for microservice communication
• Migrated database workloads to Amazon DynamoDB for automatic scaling and reduced management

Infrastructure Automation

• Created CDK builders to template and automate deployment of both static and dynamic components
• Implemented infrastructure lifecycle management through CI/CD pipelines
• Established automated testing and validation for infrastructure changes

A Platform for Expansion

The cloud migration delivered by Necko Technologies has transformed TelSmart's business capabilities:

Unlimited Scalability

TelSmart can now effortlessly accommodate their rapid customer growth without capacity planning or hardware procurement delays, enabling them to quickly respond to market opportunities.

Geographic Freedom

The multi-region architecture allows TelSmart to deploy services close to customers across Europe, maintaining the low latency essential for high-quality VoIP services without establishing physical infrastructure in each country.

Operational Efficiency

By eliminating most infrastructure management tasks, TelSmart has reduced their operational overhead by approximately 40%, allowing their team to focus on product development and customer experience.

Cost Optimization

The new architecture aligns costs with actual usage patterns rather than peak capacity needs, providing significant savings during off-peak hours while maintaining guaranteed performance.

Developer Empowerment

TelSmart's development team now has full control over their infrastructure through CDK, enabling them to define, deploy, and modify resources as code alongside their application development.

AWS Services Used