G2 Mint, a TMS startup in the transportation management industry, needed to launch a cost-effective, cloud-based platform connecting brokers, shippers, and carriers. Despite leveraging AWS for its SaaS product, the company faced significant hurdles in meeting an aggressive go-live deadline. Its existing single-account AWS setup created governance, security, and maintenance bottlenecks, making it difficult to align with the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The CI/CD pipeline, initially relying on Amplify (Gen1), offered limited visibility into build failures and was time-consuming. Security and compliance were also top concerns, as the frequent drift in CloudFormation templates led to slow and unpredictable releases. To address these issues and drastically reduce the time to deploy new features, G2 Mint sought a solution that incorporated multi-account governance, improved CI/CD workflows, and streamlined Infrastructure as Code.
A comprehensive assessment revealed the need for a multi-account setup through AWS Control Tower to isolate various workloads, such as core modules, AI features, and plugins, all of which had been housed in a single AWS account. Once this multi-account structure was defined, the team reworked the CI/CD pipeline by migrating to AWS-native tools, including CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, and CodeDeploy, which were integrated with Nx Cloud for parallel builds. JFrog Artifactory supported artifact management, and Cypress provided automated testing coverage. To further minimize risk during updates, a blue/green deployment strategy was introduced, enabling seamless rollbacks and near-zero downtime releases. In parallel, CloudFormation templates were modularized to reduce drift and improve maintainability. AWS Organizations, AWS Config, GuardDuty, and Security Hub were configured for centralized security guardrails and automated compliance checks. Monitoring and observability were enhanced using Amazon CloudWatch dashboards, coupled with Nx Cloud analytics and Slack/SNS alerts for timely notifications. Beyond modernizing the pipeline, the solution also featured a robust data processing flow: data was staged in S3, cleansed with AWS Glue PySpark jobs, and written to the target database using AWS Lambda. AWS Step Functions orchestrated each step of this data lifecycle, while EventBridge triggered real-time updates and wrote statuses to DynamoDB for continuous tracking. The entire implementation was rolled out in a phased manner—from foundational setup and account governance to refactoring IaC and ultimately piloting the solution in staging environments—before the final production cutover.
By adopting this enhanced AWS DevOps strategy and aligning with Well-Architected guidelines, G2 Mint reduced deployment times by 80%. Core modules that once took hours to deploy could now be released within minutes, and the improved governance prevented cross-team dependencies from clogging the pipeline. The blue/green approach minimized both downtime and risk, which was crucial given the company’s high-pressure timeline of moving from sandbox to beta by October 2024 and fully going live by the New Year. Operational visibility also improved dramatically. The shift away from Amplify (Gen1) provided clearer logs and simplified debugging, while Nx Cloud’s parallelization capabilities shortened build cycles. AWS Control Tower’s multi-account structure not only facilitated scaling but also offered a clearer separation of duties and better security posture. Ultimately, G2 Mint successfully met its go-live goals, delivered a more stable platform to customers, and established a blueprint for ongoing, agile improvements to its transportation management solution.
