AWS DevOps

StrataMap

The rate of social and technology change is increasing. Large organisations are struggling to respond as they are both burdened by legacy technologies and runaway complexity. StrataMap helps ease their pain of change by providing clients with a new way to visualise and collaborate on business and technology design using a SaaS modelling platform.

The Challenge

StrataMap identified that to scale their business, changes needed needed to be made to the underlying application hosting platform. The infrastructure supporting the product needed refinement to support customer growth and remove single points of failure.

There were also optimisations in the development process that could be made to enable new features to be released, faster. The development team had a desire to adopt a new methodology to foster good DevOps practices.

The Solution

API Talent provided the thought leadership and technical delivery to rearchitect the application hosting platform and implement a new continuous delivery continuous integration pipeline.

A docker-based solution with Amazon EC2 Container Service was chosen to enable the security and deployment portability that was required to sustain a rapid release cadence. API Talent supported StrataMap developers through the application rearchitecture and deployment to the cloud.

To create the development pipeline, API Talent looked to the AWS Code* family of products. An AWS CodePipeline was deployed into North Virginia, with AWS CodeCommit acting as the docker image source code repository, and AWS CodeBuild acting as the build component. AWS Lambda was used to deploy built images across regions into Sydney.

"API Talent is our most trusted IT partner having successfully designed and built our highly customised AWS DevOps environment from the ground up."

Hugh Walcott

Director, StrataMap

Radium

The Challenge

Radium’s application stack was not native to cloud and needed to be ported from an on-premise environment and launched within less than two months as a highly available cloud service. Some aspects of the application contained single points of failure and did not meet new platform availability requirements. New application releases were deployed manually. Database layer was not as resilient as it needed to be so had to be rearchitected to use improved technology.

The Solution

Working with Radium, we rearchitected the application tiers with automation as a primary focus. AWS CloudFormation was used for Infrastructure as Code so that changes could be versioned and environments could be consolidated and deployed on demand. Existing instances were refactored into AWS Elastic Beanstalk apps with a SQL backend mirrored across availability zones.

Benefits           

Speed to market

The time taken from development phase to project go-live was reduced to 2 months. Giving rise to business agility, Radium can now react faster to changes in the market.            

Better service for customers

Deploying applications to the cloud meant Radium’s application was running closer to their customers, resulting in lower latencies and a better overall user experience.    

Increased assurance

Radium’s customers have the assurance of a higher service availability because the environment leverages autoscaling components in AWS. By using additional AWS services, Radium can also release new code reliably and more effectively, without impacting the service.

"API Talent were excellent to work with. API Talent were not phased by extremely short timeframes we asked them to deliver within.  We were able to quickly trust and rely on their Cloud Architecture to navigate the complexities we presented and get a fantastic outcome for us and our client."

Kate Hyndman

Chief Executive, Radium

Area360

API Talent has been a great vendor for Area360.

At short notice API Talent were able to commit a team with top quality AWS, architecture, devops and API development experience to assist us in developing a secure, scalable and extensible solution for our customers. API Talent developed a scalable API microservices architecture to back an elegant AWS Cloud Native application that exceeded expectations in an aggressive timeframe. This project would not have been possible without API Talent’s skill and experience and the breadth and maturity of AWS services.

Our customers now benefit from a higher quality experience,seamlessly enabling their sales and marketing capability. We expect to be able to manage high bursty load, product enhancements and customer onboarding easier than ever before. The skill and experience at API Talent allowed us to take advantage of the remarkable AWS products and services.

“Working in partnership, we expect to continue enhancing the application and we have high expectations of future successes.”

– Andrew Reid, CTO