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About Plezzel

Plezzel is a company that provides unique consumer journeys within the Real Estate sector. The Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution provides marketing automation software. Plezzel’s solution provides the time-saving and marketing tools that agents need to get more listings, grow their rent roll, and build better relationships with their prospects.

The Business Challenge

With the speed of innovation occurring in the Real Estate industry and the pace of change in Digital Marketing, the Plezzel management team decided to upgrade their platform infrastructure to cater for planned growth and uptake.

Running Plezzel’s platform on-premise technologies on the same server was challenging for the Plezzel team. This required lots of computing power and 3rd party supplier labour  to manage  the platform. The main challenges were their environmental complexity. DNX took up the challenge to build the best solution possible for Plezzel, designing and sharing a simple and efficient architecture on AWS with their team.

The Solution

There’s nothing better than starting your cloud journey with a fresh, Well-Architected account and getting your DNX.One Foundation in-place, leveraging all 5 pillars of the AWS Well-Architected framework, operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimisation (check more about our AWS foundations here). 

Moving to the cloud with the DNX.One Foundation established was a decisive step to improve Plezzel operations and made way for a series of DevOps automations, using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – one of many DNX deliverables. 

Then, the DNX team started to modernise Plezzel API workloads and prepare them for their new platform in the cloud. The application platform includes ECS for container orchestration using spot instances that are up to 70% cheaper with on-demand instances. It also has zero-downtime deployments in test and production environments using CodeDeploy and its own custom CI/CD pipeline for the application.

Once API workloads were relieved from the on-premise server, we enabled the team to migrate the on-premise hosting platform to AWS. Initially, it’s a complex ‘lift and shift’ task, designing the new equivalent services on AWS and converting any local application or service to cloud managed services.

As moving to a cloud-hosted solution was a priority for Plezzel, moving the on-premise hosting platform to AWS was critical. 

As soon as DNX team got the on-premise hosted server up-and-running in the cloud, we started to convert a few services to AWS resources such as the database, to an AWS managed database service with multi availability zones for a Disaster Recovery Strategy. Email service was converted to SES reducing significant costs with storage and reducing the load in the server along with moving DNS services. These actions were necessary to relieve the load and operations contained in the server that was sharing hardware and network resources with other services.

Some of the AWS Services provisioned:

Conclusion

We achieved both high availability and disaster recovery in their new AWS cloud, plus a range of features. The Plezzel team can focus on improving their product in a new cloud-native way with modern architectures, now the main challenges have been solved by DNX and Plezzel teams. The new environments have AWS managing a few services like email, storage, DNS, deployments, and database, so Plezzel team can dedicate more time to what they do best – building solutions to connect their users with clients and innovate their features in a production-mirrored environment, eliminating variances from testing to release steps.

At DNX Solutions, we work to bring a better cloud and application experience for digital-native companies in Australia.

Our current focus areas are AWS, Well-Architected Solutions, Containers, ECS, Kubernetes, Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery and Service Mesh.

We are always hiring cloud engineers for our Sydney office, focusing on cloud-native concepts.

Check our open-source projects at https://github.com/DNXLabs and follow us on Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook.