The government of the Flemish region of Belgium, Flanders (Vlaanderen in Dutch), partnered with amazee.io to host and maintain a dedicated state-of-the-art web platform

Vlaanderen.be is the hub for civic information in Flanders and was due for a radical refresh. With ambitious modernization goals, it relaunched in March 2019. Throughout development and post-launch, their technology team has worked with amazee.io to leverage a flexible, custom hosting solution built on amazee.io’s open source platform, Lagoon. Together, the teams have partnered to achieve the scalability, maintainability, and flexibility necessary to host complex decoupled web applications relying heavily on microservices.

Challenge: Build a robust, scalable hosting solution that meets all relevant government standards and expectations while being flexible enough to host a broad stack of the latest technologies.

With an eye towards effectively integrating and utilizing the latest, most promising web technologies, Vlaanderen’s technology team has had a unique set of hosting requirements. They evaluated common hosting options including well-known cloud providers and doing it in-house. Determining that the alternatives were too limiting, the team chose amazee.io’s dedicated Lagoon hosting solution.

Solution: Implement and maintain Lagoon as an integrated solution on the client’s dedicated AWS account, customizing it with integrations to support advanced logging, monitoring, and application development.

“amazee.io knows the landscape, the threats and solutions, better than anyone else.” — Tomas Fülöpp, ICT Architect at the Flanders Information Agency

Through a process of ongoing collaboration and continuous delivery, the teams work hand-in-hand as true partners. In addition to platform implementation, ongoing support, and server management, amazee.io provides Vlaanderen’s team technical advice on architectural and technical implementation challenges.

Prior to working with amazee.io, the hosting was outdated and inflexible, and deployments were cumbersome and risky. Now, with a microservice and API-first approach, git-based deployments, and containerization, the development process is streamlined, environments are fully congruent, and the system is flexible enough to run any application or service. Developers, content editors, and front-end users enjoy faster, smoother experiences with Vlaanderen.be.

“Our developers really love the smooth deployment path and the obvious robustness and scalability of the infrastructure.” — Tomas Fülöpp, ICT Architect at the Flanders Information Agency

Results

• Infrastructure cost reduction

• State-of-the-art and constantly improving infrastructure

• Enthusiastic collaboration on architectural and technical challenges

• Smooth Git-based deployments

• Robust and scalable system

• Complete flexibility to run anything that can run in Docker