A successful AWS and DevOps implementation could only be achieved by an organized and secure AWS account strategy, VPC, and Infrastructure architecture that leveraged AWS services such as Elastic Beanstalk, S3, and RDS to reduce overhead and simplify their workflows.

Our leading U.S. Client provides career pathways for brilliant youths and keen adult learners through diverse and affordable online diploma, certificate and degree programs, offered via its high school, career school and college. Our client’s online and blended learning programs are delivered in a self-paced, competency-based model wrapped by comprehensive academic, professional and personal support and coaching.

Our client engaged with Centizen to architect a Cloud migration and DevOps strategy to better suit their customer needs and modernize their infrastructure. They were hosting infrastructure almost exclusively in an on-prem data centre which proved to be both costly and inflexible. Infrastructure provisioning was noted to be a major bottleneck in their software development lifecycle.

Since the application and infrastructure automation was scarce and outdated, our client needed some direction and additional resourcing to help increase efficiency and decrease costs. With little no existing automation, this presented its own challenges in regard to repeatable deployments and infrastructure automation. They desired to be a more reliable and performant service provider for their customers across the board.

Centizen team supported the engagement with a DevOps architect, a DevOps engineer, and a Project Manager. Our team provided a single account strategy consisting of several VPC’s for segregated development and production environments. Shared services were placed into their own account and VPC’s configured with peering as necessary to reduce the AWS footprint while maintaining security.

This allowed client’s engineering team to operate within the confines of their own secure environments. Several on-prem practices such as shared VM’s with databases and NFS shares were replaced with relevant AWS services like RDS and S3 to provide scalability and reliability. This simplified what the operations team supported and provided the development teams better flexibility. These were managed through Elastic Beanstalk and Cloud Formation Templates.

The databases and applications were launched to their respective restricted subnets to protect against intrusion. Since our client also wanted to move onto newer technologies in the DevOps arena, our team recommended and stood up a basic Continuous Delivery toolchain in AWS. All infrastructure and software installation on the environments are managed through a combination of CloudFormation, Python Scripts, and Elastic Beanstalk in a Jenkins Pipeline.

Centizen finally configured the major challenge to enable logging and resource monitoring on the environment, so that our client would be notified of any unwanted access attempts and/or impacts to environment performance.

• Client recognised the advantage of successful implementation of Centizen’s AWS and DevOps strategies.
• Centizen ensured that only valid employees or contractors would have access to the AWS environments for maintaining security.
• By enabling these technologies, Client can view and audit access logs to ensure that malicious entities are not gaining access to the AWS environment.
• Scalability and cost efficiency were also achieved by this method of Centizen.
  

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