Janes is a leading provider of intelligence to government agencies and the defence sector. The business provides trusted open-source defence intelligence that empowers mission-critical decisions for governments and military manufacturers worldwide. If you've watched a single-server ingestion platform turn into an overnight bottleneck that your analysts work around rather than through, you'll recognise the position Janes had reached.
To scale their intelligence-gathering capability and maintain market leadership, Janes needed to modernise the core data ingestion platform. The existing platform was a monolithic application, architected to run on a single Windows server in the cloud. While functional, its design was fundamentally incapable of scaling to meet ambitions.
The single-server architecture created a critical bottleneck. The system took twelve hours to run as it processed data from various internet sources, and that delay forced analysts to spend most of their time on low-value data gathering instead of high-value analysis, directly hindering the company's strategic goals.
Janes partnered with D55 to re-architect the application completely, moving from the constraints of a single server to the scale of a modern, serverless architecture on AWS. The task was to transform the slow, sequential process into a massively parallel system.
Using AWS Lambda, we designed a platform that could spin up thousands of concurrent serverless functions on demand. Orchestrated by AWS Step Functions and EventBridge, the new engine processes huge volumes of data simultaneously, eliminating the single-server bottleneck entirely.
The first full ingestion run on the new platform completed in under two minutes, against the legacy twelve hours. Analysts watched the bottleneck they'd worked around for years disappear in a single run.
Massive speed increase. Data ingestion now takes less than two minutes to complete, a 99.9 per cent reduction in processing time, while handling 35 times more data sources.
Elimination of manual work. Analysts no longer need to spend time aggregating disparate data sources. They can now focus their time on value-added analysis, such as identifying risks, trends, and commercial opportunities.
A proactive and scalable intelligence engine. Event-driven logic was created to proactively notify analysts of changes, turning a slow, reactive process into a real-time intelligence engine that can scale to meet future demand.
The pattern transfers. When your workload is a slow sequential process on a single server and your strategic question is scale, the right architectural move is rarely "bigger server" or "more servers"; it's serverless. AWS Lambda orchestrated by Step Functions and EventBridge turns sequential work into massively parallel work and removes your bottleneck rather than enlarging it.
.png)
.png)
.png)
