Challenges
A leading management e-publication owned by a premier US university wanted to rearchitect its legacy digital learning and skill development platform to AWS. The monolithic legacy platform’s tightly coupled architecture made it difficult to scale out different components for stand-alone usage. In addition, they wanted to operationalize a serverless platform to achieve elasticity and scalability as they were planning to expand to new geographies.
The e-publication wanted to take advantage of the cloud for:
Scalability to accommodate more subscribers in line with their expansion plans
Low latency with regional availability zones to process search results faster for their users
Security to prevent information theft and service disruptions
Self-recovery with serverless architecture to guarantee application availability and zero downtime
Additionally, there was a need to automate the environment provisioning and application deployment process for single-click implementation and faster releases. They were also looking for 8×5 operational support for cloud infrastructure, application, and customer tickets.
84% shorter delivery cycles with automated DevOps — 1 week vs. 6 weeks
Solution
The Impetus team was tasked with making several critical technology choices. The team designed, provisioned, and deployed a fully secured application on AWS which addressed all critical needs including:
- Scalability: Serverless technologies like Lambda and API Gateway scaled automatically as per the user load
- Low latency: CloudFront edge locations distributed static content to the user from nearby geographies
- Speed: Native-AWS tools like CodeBuild, CodePipeline, and CodeDeploy sped up the release process with single-click deployment
- Security: Web Application Firewall (WAF) secured the applications from malicious attacks
- Customer 360: A mix of external and AWS monitoring tools like New Relic, CloudWatch, and Xray provided 360-degree visibility into application performance and end-user experience
The solution also provides:
- High availability of critical components using platform services like Lambda, CloudFront, S3, and Elastic Beanstalk
- An incident management process to handle customer tickets using JIRA
- Separate environment categories for QA, staging, UAT, and production using AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure
- Secure communication between all application components with AWS VPC
- User, role, and policy management using IAM and Cognito
- Robust disaster recovery environment using S3 regions, CI pipelines, and RDS Multi-AZ replication
- Support for peak loads with auto scalability using Auto Scaling Groups (EC2 instances), Lambda events, and CloudWatch
- 8×5 operational support for cloud infrastructure including 150 Lambda functions, 20 APIs, Cognito pools, RDS and Elasticsearch instances, and CloudFront
Migrated to the rearchitected applications with zero business downtime
Business Benefits
The scalable application with automated environment provisioning and application deployment enabled the client to:
- Reduce the delivery release cycle from 6 weeks to 1 week
- Enhance scalability to support up to 10K concurrent users
- Acquire 300K subscribers in 6 months
