NotifyMe

The Need

NotifyMe chose beSharp as an AWS Premier Consulting Partner to define the Cloud Adoption strategy that best fitted their increasing business needs and put it into action quickly to support the platform’s development effectively.

The Challenge

• Obtain a scalable architecture, able to adapt to any workload spike, and achieve agility and infrastructure ease of management. Make the infrastructure reliable, resilient, and highly available with no Single-Point-of-Failure so that it could resist any service disruption or node failure.
• Introduce a new Cloud-oriented approach based on versioning and documentation, make infrastructure replication easy and fast and centralize control and management of all the company accounts, services and resources in use.
• Boost development and speed up the release time by switching to a micro-releases approach implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

The Solution

• Design and build of a fully-managed infrastructure based on microservices taking advantage of a three-tier architecture: the Front-end delivery to end-customers was entrusted to the storage service Amazon S3 together with Amazon Cloudfront as a content delivery network (CDN). The back-end was able to ensure secure and fast end-to-end connections through Application Load Balancer (ALB) and TLS offloading along with an effective incoming traffic distribution across multiple AZs. AWS ECS Fargate was also used as a key-service for the managed provisioning of containers and serverless services like AWS Lambda for event-driven configurations, Amazon API Gateway for efficient APIs management at any scale were introduced to completion of the tier. To support the solution in the best way, RDS PostgreSQL was involved as a managed and resilient DB. A managed authentication system was implemented through Amazon Cognito.
• Setup of a custom multi-environment and multi-account configuration, and management centralization according to the AWS Landing Zone best practices leveraging on the service AWS Organizations. Implementation of the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) paradigm through AWS CloudFormation introducing infrastructure versioning and replication, while keeping control over the resources.
• Setup of CI/CD pipelines – tailored for each tier – through the use of AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeDeploy. All the repositories were, also, migrated seamlessly to AWS CodeCommit.

The Benefits

Responsiveness

Thanks to the use of the AWS managed service, NotifyMe team got rid of the management of the infrastructure freeing up time for the development of new features. Through the agility and the scalability offered by the Cloud – and by the serverless approach, in particular – the customer obtained an infrastructure able to adapt to any workload spike while keeping costs very low. Using microservices made it possible to improve fault isolation and add flexibility.

Agility

Through a new, more efficient company accounts and environments configuration, NotifyMe succeeded in reflecting operational units perfectly improving both control and governance. The Infrastructure as Code paradigm permitted infrastructure replication allowing the team to easily recreate development environments both for testing purposes and for new region or services experimentations as well as to facilitate Incident Response and Disaster Recovery.

Readiness

The introduction of CI/CD Pipelines speeded up development and allowed a fast deployment for all the application packages on the new infrastructures. A fully-managed hosting repository service made it easy for the teams to cooperate and code in a secure and highly scalable environment. Thanks to the new Continuous Delivery approach NotifyMe improved readiness and reduced time-to-market considerably while offering to customers the best user experience possible.

About beSharp and AWS

NotifyMe partnered up with the AWS Premier Consulting Partner beSharp to build a secure, agile and scalable infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services Cloud. Thanks to the expertise of beSharp’s Solutions Architects in the design, build, and management of Cloud infrastructures, the customer could follow the Cloud Adoption Strategy that best fitted their needs and obtained an orderly and easily maintainable infrastructure, designed according to DevOps best practices and in full compliance with the 5 pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency and cost optimization. beSharp’s Cloud Experts supported NotifyMe technicians during the implementation of the new Cloud paradigm within the existing corporate workflows through a training on-the-job approach, making them autonomous in management.