All property documents stored in one place

Finnish Construction Experts—or simply SUORAA—is a renovation specialist whose core business is property condition inspections and assessments. Our collaboration with SUORA has been ongoing since 2015. In 2022, our successful partnership took a new turn with the Talovisio system renewal project, during which the system was updated to bring its technology and user interface in line with the 2020s.

The Talovisio system serves as a safeguard for every property owner and a document that ensures information about the property’s maintenance and inspection history is transferred from owner to owner in electronic form. Talovisio contains all condition inspection reports, utility meter readings, and the property’s maintenance log. Users can log the maintenance work they’ve performed into the system, and Talovisio also predicts when the technical service life of a particular building component is nearing its end.

The renovation project, carried out in 2022, was launched because the system’s user interface needed to be modernized to meet the standards of the 2020s. The user interface did not meet current standards, and some of the technologies used were outdated. The updated system continues to run on the Laravel framework used in the original implementation. AngularJS, which was used for the system’s user interface, was replaced with Next.js (React). Development practices also shifted from traditional CSS styling to Tailwind.

DevOps, Cloud-Native & IaC

The previous version of the system ran entirely on G-Works’ own hardware. Functionality updates were deployed to production manually using simple Git version control push and pull commands. With this overhaul, the system was made fully cloud-native, development methods were updated, and we transitioned to IaC (Infrastructure as Code) processes for maintaining the infrastructure. You can read more about these changes on our blog here.

Talovision’s infrastructure is version-controlled and automated using Terraform and GitLab Runner. This enables both production updates and the rapid deployment of individual environments.

The software is run locally using Docker Compose, which ensures that all developers are always using the same version of the software.
Laravel’s own Laravel Sail command-line interface is used to run the backend.

In practice, software updates are performed by adding new code to version control, which is then packaged within the runner into its own Docker image.
This image is pushed to the AWS (Amazon Web Services) container registry, after which ECS starts the service. If no errors are detected in the software, traffic is automatically routed to the new application via the Elastic Load Balancer, which is responsible for load balancing, and the old application is shut down. This ensures that the software update does not cause any service interruptions.

Next.js, chosen as the software’s user interface, runs within the same image but on a different port.

As a result of the modernization project, the Talovisio system has evolved into a highly impressive and technologically advanced data repository suitable for every property owner.