One of the world's leading digital customer engagement tools wished to replicate its AWS infrastructure in the US for expansion into Europe. Modus Create deployed a modern, automated infrastructure, allowing the client's flagship SaaS portfolio to scale in Europe and beyond in just 12 weeks.
Our Work Involved
- Cloud Assessment
- Infrastructure as Code
- State Analysis
- Knowledge Base Creation
- ECS Build with Terraform
- Cloud Infrastructure Automation
Impact
- Reduced VPC Costs
- Automated Infrastructure Deployment
- Consolidated Documentation
- Improved Regulatory Compliance
3 Months — Engagement Duration
6 VPCs Consolidated Into One
A popular customer-sentiment analysis tool was initially envisioned as a simple mobile app. An earlier engagement with Modus Create had helped it transform into a full-scale SaaS platform to increase call center efficiency. The platform was a huge hit and got acquired by a global digital customer engagement company.
A few months after the acquisition, the client decided to expand into the European market. It already had a mature and robust infrastructure powered by AWS in the United States. However, it lacked the scaffolding required to expand into Europe.
The client approached Modus Create to replicate the US back end so the platform could confidently deploy in Europe.
Understanding the Problem
A team of six experts from Modus Create (DevSecs specialist, DevOps engineers, lead engineers, and a project manager) joined the client team to work on the project. They noticed that almost 90% of the AWS infrastructure in the US was built manually and didn’t have sufficient documentation. In addition, many of the developers who had worked on the initial infrastructure had left the organization, which made replicating it especially difficult.
The client recognized this hampered growth and could eventually affect application performance, security, and efficiency.
Therefore, the team decided to troubleshoot the entire infrastructure and automate it completely. This would create a strong foundation for replicating the infrastructure for new locations in the future.
Performing State Analysis
Our team gathered data to perform state analysis across three pillars — Security, Automation, and Documentation. The goal was to understand the gaps between the existing and ideal state and propose a strategy to bridge them.
The team identified the following gaps:
- The Jenkins version was out of date
- HSTS was missing from the HTTPS server
- Infrastructure couldn’t be set up by running a file
- Confluence data was out of sync with the state of procedures, integrations, and configuration files
Implementation Strategy and Execution
By following distributed agile best practices, we followed an integrated “one team” approach with the client team to address the gaps from the state analysis. The resulting implementation strategy focused on adopting Infrastructure as Code by splitting the entire infrastructure into modules using Terraform.
The team proposed ECS Architecture instead of EKS as it would provide the flexibility to be “cloud agnostic” and deploy the environment into other cloud providers. It also suggested a plan to reduce the AWS infrastructure by collapsing six VPCs into one, which would lead to significant cost savings.
Technologies Used
The client agreed with the recommendations and the implementation strategy. They asked us to work on executing the recommendations based on the suggested plan.
Now, the focus of our team shifted from strategy to action. In just 12 weeks, they executed a complete ECS build with Terraform, delivering Infrastructure as Code in an AWS environment. Following the findings in the assessment, they also included extra security components from the ECS stack, ensuring the infrastructure is vulnerability-free and compliant with all PCI DSS assessments.
Impact of the Engagement
The client can easily deploy the new infrastructure to other regions in the future, as needed. They can simply copy and paste the code into a different region and get an infrastructure up and running. The entire process would take less than a few minutes instead of three months.
Additionally, collapsing VPCs in AWS from six to one significantly reduced overall costs.
The engagement also helped create documentation to consolidate all the insights and process-related details. This has provided the client with a single source of truth for all infrastructure-related information and improved regulatory compliance.
Vital Stats
Engagement duration
Consolidated into one
Are you interested in building a scalable, cloud-based infrastructure? Talk to Modus. As an official AWS partner, we have helped some of the world’s leading organizations create a robust infrastructure for digital expansion.
