Fieldtex is a private family owned company that operates out of a 55,000 sq.ft. facility in Rochester, NY and employs over 190 people.

It was founded in 1973 and is made up of three divisions:

Division 1: Fieldtex Cases – Their contract manufacturing division that produces soft sided carrying cases for portable electronic equipment for medical and military markets, wearable medical and military garments, and other textile innovations.

Division 2: Fieldtex Medical – Their First Aid Supplies division, distributes stock First Aid Kits, custom First Aid Kits, and First Aid supplies to emergency medical corps., schools, cities, towns, youth team sports leagues and the general safety marketplace.

Division 3: OTC Benefits Solutions – Works with Health Plans and other organizations to offer Supplemental Over the Counter Benefit Programs to members of Medicare Advantage Health Plans.

The Challenge

Fieldtex had multiple applications hosted with a relatively expensive offsite provider. As part of a tech refresh most applications were migrated to new hardware and their public facing .com website was the only application being hosted on two large legacy servers that were significantly over-provisioned (two 16×64 servers). Source control was not in place and there was no formal release process.

The Solution

Innovative proposed migrating their .com website to AWS, leveraging appropriately provisioned Amazon EC2 instances in AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments. AWS CodeCommit allowed for the website’s code to be to be version controlled. AWS CodePipeline was leveraged to create application packages that could be deployed to the AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments. Amazon Aurora Serverless was used to minimize infrastructure costs and operational overhead while providing flexibility in the case of unexpected bursts of traffic. Amazon SES is used to send email.

Innovative also created an integration with Office 365 APIs to push notifications to Microsoft Teams whenever a manual approval is needed. This was accomplished by creating an Amazon SNS topic for manual approval steps that triggers an AWS Lambda function that pushes to Office 365.

Van Hook Service Company (Van Hook) is located in Rochester, NY and has served the upstate New York for over 45 years in the Industrial/Commercial Refrigeration & Air Conditioning industry.

Van Hook provides expert system design, replacement, service and installations. They have developed a new way of providing their customers with outstanding HVAC&R services, called, GENESIS. The use of new custom created information technology provides their customers with the information and management tools they need to oversee their substantial investment in all mechanical equipment serviced by Van Hook.

The Challenge

Van Hook had a custom .NET web application running on two EC2 instances in AWS. Each EC2 instance was an independent application environment: Test & Prod. Deployment of the Van Hook web application was a manual process consisting of creating a deployment package on a developer’s computer and manually pushing files out to the Amazon EC2 instances via Remote Desktop. This process required significant developer overhead and was susceptible to human error (logging into the wrong server, copying the files to the wrong web application, etc).

The Solution

Innovative put in place a process where packages created on developer’s machines can be uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket via the AWS CLI Amazon S3 cp command. The Amazon S3 file upload triggers a AWS Lambda function which then calls AWS CodeDeploy to install the uploaded package onto the correct Amazon EC2 instance. HTTP headers in the Amazon S3 upload request determine onto which Amazon EC2 instance the new package is deployed. Leveraging this approach rather than deploying via the AWS CLI directly provided a history of application deployments archived in Amazon S3.