Infrastructure Operations And Management
The use and adoption of cloud computing services are proliferating throughout society and enterprises are shifting from a “build” to a “consume” paradigm for their information technology (IT) needs. This is driving the increasing adoption of cloud computing services. Today the growth of cloud computing is being driven by improvements in internet availability, reliability, and performance. Further, the commoditization of the required hardware components and the adoption of design practices such as hardware virtualization and service-oriented software architectures have given rise to a booming industry of companies offering cloud computing services. Having a sound knowledge of all this and the advancements going on in cloud computing, we recently helped our client move their on-premise website to the AWS cloud. This was coupled with giving them incessant AWS infrastructure management services including security and support.
Client
The client is a government department hosting an on-premise WordPress website with linkages to salesforce.
Business Goal
The client was planning to shift its website over the cloud and approached us with a need of managing its cloud infrastructure and thereby minimizing existing its’s downtime period along with helping them make optimal use of their resources.
Nuage Solution
As the first step of our solution, our cloud experts began with discovering and understanding the existing infrastructure landscape of the client. We then defined the requirements in terms of security and support along with the Service Level Agreement (SLA) and the integration tools that were needed.
As a part of the SLA, our India based operations center onboarded the client for 24/7/365 support and this includes all infra and WordPress application servers and RDS instances excluding the WordPress application.
To start with, the team undertook the task of AWS Resource Management on a daily basis. This included provisioning of new AWS resources as per the client’s need and encompassed compute storage, new networks, and database requirements with using AWS service tools, as we helped the client shift the infrastructure on cloud computing.
Presently, the team as a part of continuous tech support responds to support requests that are related to the AWS environment via Jira, Slack, E-mails, and CloudWatch coupled with monitoring alerts. Further, the team is actively involved in providing the client Backup and Recovery services day in day out with the help of AMI and EBS snapshots (and RDS snapshots where applicable) with AWS Native Services tools. Our cloud experts have also configured the client’s environment to keep track of relevant and important events using CloudTrail and CloudWatch by establishing alerts for the same. For round the clock alert services, we have banded the alerts to Slack and Jira and the client has been given the facility of logging their issues on it.
Further as per our SLA with the client, our cloud engineers perform some monthly exercises that include services like Patching of all Linux OS as per recommendations from OEM via AWS Systems Manager. To track it thoroughly we use Jira as a tool. Vulnerability scanning is also performed as a monthly exercise via AWS Inspector. We also share the reports that are generated on vulnerability issues on a monthly basis with the client.
In our endeavor to provide a complete solution, the team provides them with Risk and Security Assessments that are coupled with the hardening of their existing servers to keep virus attacks at bay. Network security and scanning, especially related to port security and scanning, security group scanning is also done by us at regular intervals to avoid any unwanted access.
As a part of our Support Services, we at Nuage provide full maintenance by supporting third parties in case of any planned pen-tests. At the infrastructure level, we make our team standby for the purpose.
Our Challenges
Our India based operations center initially did not have access to RDS Database sizes to work on the tickets raised. Once our on-shore team got the access to RDS Database sizes and shared the same with our India based team, we were able to work, solve and close the tickets that were raised.
Another issue we faced was the website going down with 502 bad gate-way, with no alert generated. For this, we implemented Pingdom along with the integration of slack so that the team gets notified whenever the website is down due to any issues like ELB, system health check failure, auto-scaling launch instance failure, etc. By this integration, the client is ultimately able to offer the best possible web experience to its customers.
The challenge of Aurora DB storage going too high was resolved when we undertook a deep analysis and changed the Timeout RDS DB parameter along with killing the long open transaction.
Also, the process gaps were bridged between the client and our team. This helped to take care of the changes in production made by the client or the team. This also helped to resolve the impact of changes made in other services like cloud watch alarms.
Technology Stack
AWS Cloud Infrastructure and Services like systems manager and Inspector.
AWS Native Services
Jira as the Monitoring and Ticketing Tool.
Linux as the Operating System
Slack for notification and alerts as well as for internal communication.
Business Outcomes
Cloud adoption is helping our client to improve business flexibility. With our single-click operations, workload migration became a seam-less business process for the client. Nuage’s cloud computing solution helped minimize business downtime, simplify operations, reduce costs, and maximize the ROI of the client’s storage and data protection investments. Through ongoing analysis and evaluation of the client’s cloud computing workloads, our cloud specialist team is working around the clock to provide the client with enhancements and optimizations that keep their business ahead of the competition.