Cribz: AWS Well-Architected Platform

Summary

CRIBZ is a Startup company based in Sydney who offers a big-data solution for real estate companies providing the data sources, insights and actions to reduce acquisition costs and increase long-term client value.

DNX was responsible for migrating CRIBZ environment to AWS Platform to deliver a very scalable and secure platform allowing the client to implement a new business model based on APIs for their customers.

Based on customers requirements, DNX deployed an AWS well-architected Foundation based on multiple accounts and network segregation, introduced DevOps practices for the development teams through a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery Pipeline and migrated CRIBZ applications to this new platform.

With this environment in place, CRIBZ could start its journey to create a new API model to help their clients to consume CRIBZ big-data.

The Business Challenge

CRIBZ platform was previously hosted on Heroku platform limiting their ability to create a modern CI/CD pipeline and accelerate their go-to-marketing time. CRIBZ was not able to use the full power of the Cloud facing several challenges when developing and deploying new features and needed a faster way to go to production.

Some challenges CRIBZ was facing were:

• Difficulties maintaining a scalable infrastructure for API architecture

• The need for a better way to deploy APIs

• Their large big-data database was already hosted on AWS, so every query was handled over the Internet, creating performance problems and security concerns

The Solution

DNX was engaged as a trusted advisor to design, implement and deploy CRIBZ’s cloud platform and application stacks.

By using DNX One — our all-in-one AWS platform based on open source Terraform modules — CRIBZ could promptly start deploying into the AWS platform. The following features were implemented:

• AWS Design and Documentation

• Infrastructure-as-code using Terraform and DNX open source modules

• CI/CD Pipelines for Terraform Projects

• Application Container Strategy

• Application Blue/Green Deployment

• AWS ECS Cluster Configuration

• AWS RDS Setup and Configuration

• CloudFront and Web Application Firewall Implementation

The diagram below illustrates the ECS design used for CRIBZ:

Lessons Learned

The following are the most important take-aways from this project:

• Infrastructure-as-code is essential to ensure immutability across AWS environments.

• Continuous Delivery unlock velocity and improve time-to-market

Next Steps

CRIBZ is now ready to start an architectural change moving new products towards cloud-native concepts and eventually to a serverless environment using Lambdas to further reduce costs and administrative burden.