Big Red Group’s challenge to create a new infrastructure for multiple unique brands

Big Red Group (BRG) is the leading experience partner in Australia and New Zealand.

BRG is the parent company of major experience brands, such as RedBalloon, Adrenaline, Lime&Tonic, and Experience OZ. Each one of them have their unique value proposition to attract and engage diverse audiences, with exclusive distribution channels, B2C and B2B offerings, and unlock access to more than 10,000 experiences across Australia and New Zealand.

The Challenge

After acquiring new brands and inheriting their technology and infrastructure, BRG had to maintain multiple infrastructure sets resulting in the challenge of creating and maintaining new functionalities for each brand. In addition, they had the challenge of providing meaningful reports for the business due to their different data models.

BRG were seeking a cloud consultant partner that could assist them in building a secure infrastructure as a service that was simple to use and maintain from day one. They also sought increasingly leveraging microservices to ensure continuous, agile delivery and flexible deployment of complex, service-oriented applications.

DNX Solutions determined BRG’s business and technical capabilities, such as the interdependencies, storage constraints, release process, and level of security. With the required information at hand and BRG’s required technology, DNX developed a roadmap to meet BRG’s Technical and Business objectives, using AWS best practices “The 7R’s” (retire, retain, relocate, rehost, repurchase, replatform, and refactor).

The Solution

BRG’s project was implemented in two phases where an AWS Foundation, Application Platform (Containers), and Application BluePrints (Static frontEnd and Containers with full CI/CD PIpeline) were delivered.

DNX Well-Architected Foundation entails

• AWS Landing Zones
• 100% infra-as-code
• CI/CD for infrastructure
• CDK in Typescript
• Knowledge transfer
• Cost Report and optimization
• AWS ClientVPN Auditing Strategy

AWS Application Platform

• AWS ECS
• CloudFront + S3 (Static Application)
• Application CI/CD Strategy
• Monitoring strategy
• Auto-scaling strategy
• Logging strategy and retention 
• Secrets management
• Application BluePrints

The Outcome

The DNX team designed and implemented a safe infrastructure as a code for AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) in typescript to run inside the AWS cloud Formation for their entire foundation as per BRG’s prerequisites. 

The typescript was chosen by BRG’s team to provide them with an easier way to write and maintain not just the applications codebase but also infrastructure. TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript which primarily provides optional static typing, classes, and interfaces. One of the big benefits is to enable IDEs to provide a richer environment for spotting common errors as you type the code which BRG’s team was already very familiar with. 

It offers all the features of JavaScript, plus an additional layer on top of these – the TypeScript type system. This can help companies to build more robust code, reduce runtime type errors, take advantage of modern features before they are available in JavaScript, and work better with development teams. 

DNX also deployed Application Blueprints (Static frontEnd and Containers with full CI/CD Pipeline) so BRG’s team could deploy, migrate, manage and monitor their own applications in the AWS cloud in the future.

As with all of our projects, DNX delivered extensive documentation and sessions on transferring knowledge covering how DNX Foundations works, how to deploy applications, how to run CI/CD pipelines, and more.

Moreover, DNX delivered the AWS Devax Academy training program Monoliths to Microservices for Java developers for six weeks.

Conclusion

No matter your needs or requirements, DNX is able to deliver the right solution for your business.