At a glance #
- Client: Agricultural Modeling and Training Systems (AMTS)
- Industry: Animal nutrition science
- Year: 2023
- Scope: Custom VPC design, standardized server access, reusable AWS deployment templates
- Outcome: AMTS now spins up dev / staging / DR environments with a single command and no longer needs a full-time cloud engineer
About AMTS #
Feeding livestock is a highly technical endeavor. Since 2005, AMTS has used data — daily animal activity, excretions and emissions, body temperature, humidity, wind speed, feed nutrient values — to optimize livestock performance and limit the environmental impact of animal agriculture.
“With these inputs, it’s just amazing how accurate the feeding becomes.”
— Caroline Rasmussen, Chief Financial Officer, AMTS
The situation before #
As AMTS migrated elements of its software stack to AWS, the environment sprawled. The team had to manually deploy resources; new environments were built from scratch each time, and there was no standardized approach to any of it. That meant:
- Slow dev / staging / DR provisioning
- Drift between environments (dev didn’t quite match production)
- Bus-factor risk — the knowledge of how to build an environment lived in a few people’s heads
- Ongoing operational load disproportionate to the size of the team
What we built #
A custom Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with standardized server access, plus a deployment template — infrastructure-as-code that AMTS could reuse across its cloud applications and a wide array of AWS services.
“With CloudKeep’s guidance, we created a custom Amazon VPC for AMTS, and now we can access servers in a more standardized way. CloudKeep has the expertise to point us in the right direction among the large array of AWS solutions, and we are now able to leverage the right technologies to meet our needs.”
— Vivian Wu, Application Developer, AMTS
“By templatizing our cloud architecture, we now have a cleaner way for adjusting when potential issues arise.”
— Vivian Wu, Application Developer, AMTS
The template lets AMTS spin up new dev, staging, and disaster-recovery environments that closely mirror production — with a click of a button rather than a week of manual work.
Outcomes #
- Standardized infrastructure. Custom VPC with consistent server access patterns across all AWS workloads.
- Reusable templates. New environments deploy in minutes with reproducible results.
- Streamlined development. Dev, staging, and DR environments mirror production, so changes are tested under realistic conditions before they ship.
- No dedicated cloud hire needed. The template is self-service for the AMTS team; they don’t need to re-engage us (or hire a full- time cloud engineer) every time they want a new environment.
- Foundation for SaaS transition. Security, scalability, and cost-efficiency baked into the template, ready for the next phase of AMTS’s product evolution.
“They have the template now, so they don’t have to hire a full-time engineer to manage their cloud services.”
— Shinichi Urano, Principal Consultant, CloudKeep
Considering a similar consolidation for your AWS environment? Start with a free 30-minute assessment.
Book a free consultation