The Cloud Masters

Project Overview

Build of ues.io infrastructure

• Project aim: Well-Architect and rebuild an existing infrastructure for ues.io
• Project challenges:
  • Global Offering
  • Innovative application architecture with microservices
  • Highly dynamic environment with many releases and stakeholders

Implemented solution

• Used target cloud platform: AWS
• Used services: ECS Fargate, RDS Aurora, DynamoDB, ALB, Config, CloudWatch, Config, GuardDuty, SSM, Cognito, AWS SSO, VPN Clients, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy

Project

Technical Background

• In the past, The Cloud Masters has manually built up two environments on AWS themselves with a modern architecture based on ECS Fargate and RDS
• Needed to build multiple new environments in an automated way
• Microservices on container images, databases in DynamoDB and Aurora Postgres
• User authentication with Cognito
• L7 routing with ALB
• CICD pipeline with a blue/green deployment

Achieved Results

Business Benefits

• ues.io SaaS application up and running and ready for beta testers
• Faster delivery of new features due to automated build of environments
• Better compliance and data integrity due to use of highly secured services and connections
• Security and disaster recovery capabilities on a much higher level
• Development can focus on business features instead of technical infrastructure aspects

Technical Benefits

• Deployments are more reliable because of blue/green deployment model
• New environments can be built within hours
• All documented in code; a proper documentation
• Highly secured services and data (Well-Architected from the beginning)

Customer Reference Text

The Cloud Masters AG (TCM) is a software as a services (SAAS) company that is building a no-code platform for platforms that allows businesses to build, share or rent out their applications in part or as a whole, either privately or publicly. It is creating a new digital ecosystem that allows app builders to build and combine applications to surface the best functionality from all and repackage them as an application with more features as a solution at less effort for redistribution. It also provides consulting services around application integration. The Cloud Masters is based in Zurich and has offices in the USA.

TCM has approached copebit AG (copebit) in the summer of 2021 to build a complete new AWS infrastructure for their TCM demonstration system. TCM has already built and operated an AWS environments themselves in a manual way but wanted to get these new environments for testing and production built in an automated fashion and based on Well-Architected principles.

During multiple joint discovery workshops, the application, its microservices, tools, and the infrastructure as well as all requirements in the disaster recovery area were documented. Many business and technical challenges were discussed, particularly in the area of scalability, stability, automation, high availability, and continuity planning. One particular requirement with high importance to TCM was to automate the delivery of new software releases via a blue/green CICD pipeline. The integration of the pipeline is partially built on GitHub and on AWS CodeDeploy for the deployment.

Over the next week, an architecture, design, and migration plan according to AWS Well-Architected principles was built, approved and executed. copebit designed and engineered the solution based on AWS CloudFormation. The actual architecture and construction took about two weeks. All components were modeled in CloudFormation, an Infrastructure as Code language by AWS. This approach allows great documentation from the start, repeatability, and improved disaster recovery. In addition, a design pattern was chosen that specified that AWS Managed Services should be used whenever they fit the requirements. The actual implemented product set of AWS evolves around: ECS Fargate, RDS Aurora, DynamoDB, ALB, Config, CloudWatch, Config, GuardDuty, SSM,  Cognito, AWS SSO, VPN Clients, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy. The build was executed in time, at budget and with no major obstacles encountered.

As a result, TCM can now focus on the development of the application and doesn’t have to waste scarce resources on IT infrastructure. The applications, databases, and files are protected with better availability, and disaster recovery is highly improved with RPO and RTO lowered. The automation of many tasks relieves the TCM team of worries about day-2 operations around security, backup or patching. 

A quote from the responsible CEO manager Gregg Baxter: “We met copebit about 6 months ago. After initial contact, it took about 3 weeks to have the ues.io application migrated to a new and very solid AWS infrastructure. We initially tried to build the AWS setup ourselves and were partially successful but soon realized that building everything in CFN was taking more valuable time of our application developers than planned. As copebit already had a great library of CloudFormation templates, they were able to build our requirements very quickly. Now we have a well-architected account that is secure, very stable, super clean and easy to use. Best thing is the blue/green deployment pipelines which make releasing new features super safe and easy.”