Building a Future-Focused AWS Solution
The collaboration started by Xebia helping to define the ‘to be’ state of the CustomerGauge AWS environment using the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The first step was to develop a multi-account strategy in order to facilitate a separation of concerns and a least privilege principle. The network security was also improved by moving resources from EC2 Classic into a new generation of Virtual Private Cloud and private network instances. Then, one by one, the CustomerGauge services have been re-engineered to run in containers on AWS ECS, rather than directly on virtual machines, initially without rewriting any of the business logic.
This is a specific example of the more general approach of switching to a consumption model wherever possible. This makes it simpler for CustomerGauge to secure the system, and to document and prove the security measures that are in place, as AWS handles a much greater proportion of the underlying server resources.
“We take a lot of pride in seeing CustomerGauge grow with AWS. Not only did they evolve through the modernization of their architecture, but also by absorbing the knowledge we presented. Antony and his team have become self-sufficient in scaling out their architecture, while relying on Xebia for 24/7 monitoring through Managed Services.” – Steyn Huizinga, CTO Xebia Cloud AWS.
The Result
The next step was to replace manual deployments with automated CI/CD pipelines in order to perform more reliable deployments and improve developer productivity. The final step was to re-develop or refactor existing services to use more modern programming languages and frameworks in order to make even greater use of services like AWS Lambda. The move to serverless is a step further in the direction of AWS managed services, in order to further increase the security and scalability of the CustomerGauge solution.
CustomerGauge went from using a first generation IaaS to the latest AWS PaaS offering. This shifted the balance of responsibility for scalability & security more towards AWS, so that CustomerGauge’s development department could focus on enhancing and increasing their platform’s business functionality. Xebia's initial vision and continual guidance was invaluable in helping them realize a cloud architecture that CustomerGauge is extremely proud of. It is scalable, secure, well audited and facilitates high developer productivity.
