Wilma is one of the best-known daily digital services for Finns. Wilma supports school children from daycare to the end of upper secondary or vocational education, making it easy for students, families and schools to stay in touch. Visma, the developer and administrator of Wilma, has gathered a top-tier developer team that keeps Wilma at the top of its class. They engaged Polar Squad to assist with their cloud migration.

As Wilma serves students, parents and teachers across Finland, it has a sizeable user base and a wide variety of features. To scale according to need, the dev team of Wilma started looking into taking Wilma to a public cloud platform for the benefits it might bring. With Polar Squad, they selected Amazon AWS as their platform.

“We chose Amazon AWS because of things like its size and trustworthiness: It helps us secure our service level and minimise the so-called niche risk. The platform is very stable, and AWS as a competence will not go away soon,” says Petri Kangasniemi, the leader of the migration project at Visma Enterprise.

Assessment ensures smooth transition

In early 2021, Polar Squad mapped the systems architecture of Wilma to determine its readiness to migrate to the cloud from its current VMware-based solution.

“The cloud will help improve things like security, uptime and scalability. Administering the service and keeping it up to date will be significantly easier, thanks to the comprehensive toolset provided by AWS,” states Pekka Siltala-Li, Consultant at Polar Squad.

Part of the project was evaluating the transition to a container-based architecture. Containers bring flexibility, and the possibility to migrate services between platforms or clouds. Containerization also offers robust tools for managing dependencies – regardless of platform, system dependencies stay intact. Scalability and security are also at a higher level in a container-based environment.

Getting Wilma in the cloud is a multi-stage process. “Reliable delivery throughout the process is key for us: A cloud migration brings a lot of concrete benefits to our end users, but the migration can’t introduce any adverse effects to our clients,” states Kangasniemi.

Reaping the full benefits of cloud-native

Besides technological solutions, improving the cultural aspects of tech work at Visma is a key part of the project. This includes improving practices and collaborative processes to enable efficient work in a new, cloud-based environment.

“A working support infrastructure, as well as precisely defined fallback and AWS publication processes are simple examples of practices that are important to think about in the early stages of migration. This enables teams to hit the ground running in their new environment. Building migration automation systematically frees up time to focus on the essential: Ensuring that the migration is fluid and new processes are built to match the tech,” states Jaakko Pallari, project lead at Polar Squad.

“The project will take the development of Wilma in a remarkably interesting direction. We’re aiming for full cloud nativity, which enables us to reap the full benefits of AWS. It offers our developers a robust environment for catering to user needs. Containerisation, serverless architecture and technologies like ECS, not to mention the cloud-native tools of AWS, offer us vast new possibilities. For our tech teams, this project foreshadows a transition to a forward-looking toolset and the possibility of making the Wilma code base and architecture even more modern than before. Our experts are excited about the future,” says Kangasniemi.

Looking to the clouds?
We can help – have a chat with Tuomas!
tuomas.lindholm@polarsquad.com – +358 40 177 1719