The Challenge

Keeping up with growth.

Over the past several years the client has experienced tremendous growth through organic channels and through mergers and acquisitions. The rate and volume of growth resulted in accelerated load on the system and required the purchase of additional physical hardware to expand capacity. In addition, the growth has necessitated faster software changes to adapt to the changing load profile. The client wanted a solution that would enable them to scale efficiently, deploy code reliably, reduce business interruptions, and monitor production without manual intervention. Given these objectives, Credera recommended improvements to the end-to-end software engineering processes based on DevOps principles and best practices.

The Solution

Modernized AWS solution.

First, Credera modernized the primary custom application supporting the client’s core business processes by moving from .NET on Windows IIS to .NET Core on EKS to establish a runtime environment with better scalability and availability. Then Credera worked alongside the client infrastructure engineers to rehost ancillary applications to Windows EC2 instances to eliminate latency between AWS and on-premises systems. As part of this migration, automated load tests were implemented to provide the team with increased visibility into future bottlenecks due to increased load. Monitoring was implemented using New Relic and CloudWatch to automatically alert the team when components of the infrastructure and applications need attention. The alerts decreased the response time and allowed the IT team to intervene prior to an outage. Additionally, all resources were provisioned from source control using Terraform. Credera also established an AWS account structure with best practices for security and governance so the client is equipped to support their rapid growth.

The Results

Equipped to support rapid growth.

After implementing this solution, the Transportation Finance Company has seen the following benefits:

• Decreased load the the current datacenter, creating more space for fast growing workloads like Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and saving the client time and money.

• By using EC2 and EKS, the client’s core systems increased their ability to scale vertically and horizontally while also improving their ability to recover quickly from future disasters. 

• The systems also gained repeatability and environment consistency by being provisioned from source control via Terraform and Kubernetes manifest. Infrastructure-as-code development was incorporated into the approval and release process, satisfying compliance and security requirements.

• AWS Control Tower was used to set up consolidated billing and provision organization units, accounts, and landing zones so the client established a strong governance model based on best practices.

• AWS Security Hub was configured to alert operations of any misalignment with CIS Benchmarks across accounts, enabling operations to remediate security issues more quickly.

• In preparation for the company’s rapid growth and expansion, the client’s leaders prioritized improving the scalability of their systems. The business’ core application and new microservices run on automatic scaling groups of EKS worker nodes with horizontal pod autoscaling.

• As a result of the rapid growth and success of the business, leaders anticipated stricter regulatory examinations and they prioritized the repeatability of all new systems to prepare for disaster recovery scenarios. In addition to the inherent capabilities of AWS managed services like Transit Gateway, systems like the EKS workload and the MSSQL Enterprise Cluster were built for multiple availability zones and provisioned with Terraform so the environments could be consistent, easier to duplicate, and ready for future efforts to establish a failover region.