Ellie Mae (Acquired by ICE Mortgage Technologies) offers the industry leading loan origination and workflow automation SaaS platform, Encompass, along with several other mortgage technology products, like AllRegs and Velocify, and Mavent.
The Challenge
Ellie Mae had made the strategic decision to build new applications on AWS and eventually migrate datacenter based applications to AWS as well, with the goal of increasing platform and application innovation velocity. As Ellie Mae transformed their development teams to a DevOps model and built and ran software on the cloud, they needed to modernize the tools that their developers rely on. The existing artifact repository solution was dated, and ran in the datacenter where it could not scale. In addition, the solution was not highly available across regions, which Ellie Mae required to ensure development velocity was not slowed down by development tooling. Without modernizing, Ellie Mae risked development inefficiencies, which could block them from meeting aggressive innovation goals.
Our Solution
Foghorn worked with Ellie Mae to rethink the artifact repository requirements and design and develop a cloud native architecture that would be auto scaling, auto healing, and multi-region active-active, allowing for high performance development environments across the nation. The solution integrated the following AWS technologies:
- EC2
- RDS
- S3
- EBS
- ROUTE53
- ALB
Migrating from the legacy environment to a new modernized, cloud native solution required minimal interruption to the development teams hard at work innovating the Ellie Mae platform, but was completed without any drama.
Results and Benefits
Ellie Mae’s new environment was more highly available due to the new fault tolerant, self healing design, and was also more performant, as the multi region active-active architecture allowed developers across the country access to a low latency node.
Auto scaling helped ensure that Ellie Mae no longer has to worry about outgrowing their artifact repository infrastructure.
Ellie Mae was also able to retire legacy infrastructure, creating availability in existing facilities, supporting additional growth.
