The client was a leading company in digital transformation for the scientific community responsible for designing highly scalable digital hubs to ensure the preservation, enrichment and easy access of scientific data. To ensure the availability and scalability of their product, they wanted to migrate their existing on-premise system to a fully event-driven DevOps friendly cloud architecture.
About the Client
Problem Statement
The client wanted a cost-effective, however highly scalable, architecture for their digital hub solution to expand their customer base. However, the existing on-premise solution did not support their expansion due to multiple reasons:
- Overestimation of resources results in a high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
- Underestimation of resources constraining the business expansion
- High maintenance overhead shifts the focus from the development process to the infrastructure maintenance
- The existing system could only serve a limited number of clients (difficulty in scalability)
The Challenge
The client wanted to:
- Build a highly automated software delivery pipeline to accelerate deployment to a large number of customers
- Build auditable processes to secure the architecture from possible threats
- Serve more clients by delivering their products to several locations in a few clicks
- Be more cost-effective in resources and reduce maintenance costs
They decided to move to the AWS cloud to achieve their goals, however, they needed support from cloud professionals to migrate and implement the best practices in the cloud.
The Solution
The client selected Scalefree as its consulting partner and:
- Built a scalable, containerized microservice-based architecture using Amazon EKS
- Secured EKS integrating with other AWS services in the ecosystem with auditable RBAC mechanism provided by AWS
- Fully automated the provisioning of infrastructure with Infrastructure as a code (IaaC) approach and deployment of the application
- Maintained a secure private link with the on-premise system to access and migrate securely to the cloud
Tangible Results for the Client
The project delivered considerable improvements towards their existing solution and helped the client implement their requirements. The four major outcomes from the collaboration were:
- Support in secure migration of data and implementation in the cloud
- Implementation of cloud best practices ensuring the cost-effective and highly secure solution
- Designing the scalable architecture where the client pays only for the resources needed. They could save more than 50% of their infrastructure cost with it
- Fully automated delivery of the product increases the focus on the development process
Overall, they could serve more customers after migrating to the cloud.
Technologies used
- Amazon EKS
- AWS EFS file system
- Terraform
- Ansible
- S3, Security Manager
- Amazon System Manager
