Krost: Using Infrastructure as code simplified scalability in AWS

DNX is all about helping our customers to leverage effective scalability, security and zero downtime deployments.

About Krost

Krost is an office furniture store that started selling office furniture back in the ’30s. Their 3 key ideals remain since then: principles of offering the best service, providing the highest quality products and selling at a fair price.

They help to shape the right corporate image through their office furniture selection.

The Business Challenge

Krost used to run their application, including their online store, in AWS using a traditional LAMP web service stack (Linux operating system, the Apache HTTP Server, the MySQL relational database management system and the PHP programming language). That stack was provisioned in a traditional way on AWS and the solution was not using AWS AutoscalingGroups, the application suffered some spikes on Memory and CPU causing manual intervention on the stack.

The Solution

The proposed DNX solution for this scenario is to transform the application and leverage Docker containers in AWS ECS for immutability and build CI/CD Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) applying blue and green deployment strategy. The objective is to deliver continuity and scalability and facilitate the promotion of new features using CI/CD pipelines, the solution was based on AWS Elastic Container Service and scalable using Spot Instances that also saves in computing costs.

The project

The project had 3 phases, in the first phase the DNX engineers build from the ground up a well-architected AWS foundation where the customer could leverage security and elasticity aspects, essentials to achieve zero-downtime deployment and CI/CD strategy.

Once we had the AWS Foundation, using terraform modules built-in, we could start phase 2 that consists of application transformation phase where DNX team understands the application dependencies, build and deployment needs. Using docker containers DNX starts to transform the application applying immutability and scalability concepts deploying it behind an ALB using ECS. We also had application tunning and CSS and JavaScript minifying tasks as along with VPN setup and Database migration to private in order to improve security aspects.

In the third phase, DNX designed and implemented the CI/CD pipeline with the best deployment strategy for the customer with zero-downtime where blue and green deployment architecture was applied. We used the current customer DevOps lifecycle tool — Bitbucket to build the CI/CD pipeline achieving the customer’s goals and preparing the cutover task.

Deploy Strategy:

• Bitbucket Pipelines

• Application build

• Application Docker Build and Push to ECR

• Application ECS Blue-Green Deployment using AWS Code Deploy

• Automatic deploy to staging

• Automatic deploy to production with manual approval

During the whole project, DNX executes transfer knowledge sections with DNX AWS certified professionals to Krost. DNX believes that is the right way to build a healthy relationship with customers and partners.

Deliverables:

• AWS Implementation as per High-Level Design

• Applications transformed and migrated to the new platform

• CI/CD Pipelines

• AWS Knowledge transfer by DNX’s AWS-Certified professionals

Conclusion

Applying DNX purposed solution, Krost could effectively experience elasticity of AWS cloud and achieve a robust and reliable deployment, eliminating the mentioned memory spikes and need of manual intervention on the stack. Also, with better performance and resilience, Krost application team are much more confident to roll out new features to the business.

DNX Solutions have outstanding knowledge on CICD pipeline, AWS services, Linux bash scripting, Infrastructure as Code and so on. They provided excellent services to Krost Business furniture including sharing knowledge. If anyone one looking for cloud server solution docker orchestration DNX Solutions is an ideal consulting agency.

Md Shofiul Alam — Krost