Echo Global Logistics: Facilitating Digital Transformation with Cloud Migration and GitOps Transition

Echo Global Logistics:

Facilitating Digital Transformation with Cloud Migration and GitOps Transition

Industry: Travel, Hospitality & Logistics

Delivery Center: CSA

Industry Context

The logistics and supply chain industry today faces numerous challenges, from meeting increasing demands to optimizing the delivery services. Enterprises are confronted with the need to modernize their IT infrastructure to enhance transparency and streamline operations to meet consumer expectations for speed, sustainability, and reliability. Traditional manual processes of supply chain management present significant hurdles to achieve a competitive edge and meet increasing client demands. There is thus an imperative for a transformative strategy with advanced technologies that can bring automation, scalability, security, and efficiency into IT operations.

Client Challenge

Our client, Echo Global Logistics, Inc., is a premier provider of technology-enabled transportation and supply chain management services. With headquarters in Chicago and over 30 offices nationwide, Echo specializes in freight brokerage and managed transportation solutions across all major modes, including truckload, partial truckload, LTL, intermodal, and expedited services. The client recognized the need for a significant IT infrastructure overhaul to support its expanding operational demands and maintain industry leadership. The manual management of their Kubernetes environments and outdated DevOps practices were barriers to scalability and agility. The customer needed a transformational strategy that could introduce automation, scalability, and efficiency into its IT operations to better respond to the dynamic logistics market.

Approach

Encora emerged as a strategic partner in Echo Global Logistics’ journey towards digital transformation, facilitating a comprehensive shift to cloud infrastructure with AWS and pioneering a DevOps to GitOps transition for enhanced CI/CD processes. AWS was selected as a platform of choice due to its comprehensive suite of services, robust security features, and scalability, enabling Echo Global Logistics to efficiently modernize its IT infrastructure and meet the dynamic demands of the logistics industry. We deployed a range of services that include:

Cloud Migration: Implemented a phased migration strategy guided by the 7Rs methodology, with the IaC framework in place. This meticulous planning ensured that each application's cloud compatibility was assessed, and the most suitable AWS services were selected for migration, spanning from SQL Server and PostgreSQL to Rabbit MQ and Kafka.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Implemented an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach using Terraform before initiating the migration. This pivotal move laid the foundation for an automated, scalable, and repeatable environment across Kubernetes and AWS infrastructure, setting the stage for a streamlined migration process.
Continuous Integration (CI) & Continuous Deployment (CD): Advanced the CI/CD processes by shifting from a traditional DevOps approach to a GitOps strategy, leveraging Azure DevOps and ArgoCD. This change not only automated deployment workflows but also introduced greater transparency, reliability, and speed to the deployment lifecycle.
Cloud Security: Transitioned a wide array of applications to Amazon EKS for microservices, and Amazon MSK for Kafka messaging. Strategically deployed additional services like Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), AWS WAF, and Amazon API Gateway to optimize application performance and security.

AWS Services

Amazon Elastic
Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Amazon Managed
Streaming for Apache
Kafka (MSK)

AWS WAF

AWS Fargate

Amazon Simple
Storage Service (S3)

Elastic Load
Balancing (ELB)

Amazon EC2

Amazon API
Gateway

Results

Echo Global Logistics’ strategic evolution, spearheaded by Encora and powered by AWS, underscores a pivotal shift towards a more automated, scalable, and efficient IT infrastructure. This transformation not only streamlined Echo’s operations but also set a new standard for agility and innovation in the logistics industry:

Implementation of an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach with Terraform enabled a seamless transition to AWS, reducing the infrastructure provisioning time and significantly enhancing Echo's infrastructure scalability and management efficiency.
Migration to a cloud-native architecture with services like Amazon EKS, empowered Echo Global with unprecedented operational agility, enabling rapid adaptation to market changes and client demands.
Deployment of AWS’s robust security and performance services significantly bolstered Echo's capability to deliver secure and reliable logistics solutions.
Transition to a GitOps strategy, utilizing tools like Azure DevOps and ArgoCD, modernized Echo Global's CI/CD processes, shortening the product feature release cycle and accelerating innovation for maintaining a competitive edge.