Hit Rail is a private limited liability company with registered offices in Utrecht, The Netherlands, established in 1990 by 10 national railways. Presently it is owned by 12 European railway companies, while Hit Rail services are used by over 50 companies from 22 countries. Hit Rail is responsible for managing the international Hermes data communications infrastructure. Its purpose is to help the European railway companies to carry out international projects in related fields of data communications and information technology.
The challenge
As part of a cloud adoption strategy, Hit Rail was looking into migrating their HEROS application stack – a middleware service offering message railway standard interoperability support to the European railway industry – to AWS. Requirements were clear. Current operations should not be interrupted, existing security solutions had to be re-used, but preferably as cloud-native services and the cloud environment needed to be securely connected to their HERMES network.
The solution
With the help of inQdo, the HEROS Common Interface (CI) platform and supporting services, were migrated from its legacy on-premises environment to a combination of Autoscaling Amazon EC2 instances and RDS databases.
Existing hardware based security solutions were replaced with AWS Marketplace alternatives. Connecting to the existing HERMES network using a Direct Connect link, we established a secure, scalable cloud native platform for the combined HEROS services and any future expansions to this platform.
The result
Moving the HEROS platform to the AWS cloud allowed Hit Rail to quickly expand their services as needed and provided a secure, highly available messaging application platform. This has greatly helped them respond to and increasing customer demand in reliability and accessibility of their applications and services.
Together with inQdo, a future-proof, fully scalable platform was deployed on AWS, with minimal downtime and impact on service availability.