Architect as a Service | Applied AI Consulting

Automating AWS Architecture for a Leading Telecommunication Company Using Terraform and Ansible

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 18:17:10 +0000

Automating AWS Architecture for a Leading Telecommunication Company Using Terraform and Ansible

Automated AWS infrastructure provisioning and management, ensuring compliance, security, and scalability while reducing deployment times and human errors through CI/CD pipelines to support business growth.

Company Overview

A leading telecommunication company, this organization provides a wide range of services including mobile, broadband, and TV services. Known for its extensive network coverage and innovative solutions, the company serves millions of customers globally, ensuring reliable and high-quality communication services. The company continually invests in technology to enhance service delivery and customer experience.

Issue

Automating the provisioning and management of AWS infrastructure.

Ensuring compliance and security across the AWS environment.

Reducing manual intervention and minimizing human errors in infrastructure management.

Enhancing scalability and reliability of the cloud infrastructure.

Let’s discuss your use cases

Contact Sales

Similar Use Cases

What Is an AI Maturity Model?

A maturity model is a framework used to assess how well your organization uses a

AAIC + Nisum Partner to Accelerate Enterprise Cloud Transformation with Agentic AI and AWS Innovation

Applied AI Consulting is proud to announce a strategic partnership with Nisum, aimed at delivering

Solution

Implemented Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) with Terraform for automated AWS resource provisioning and management, alongside Ansible for consistent configuration and compliance across environments.

Set up automated CI/CD pipelines to streamline infrastructure deployments, minimizing manual intervention and accelerating deployment times.

Integrated AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, and CloudWatch for continuous compliance, security monitoring, and automated alerting.

Impact

Automated Infrastructure Provisioning

Successfully automated AWS resource provisioning and management, ensuring a streamlined infrastructure process.

Compliance and Security

Achieved robust compliance and security across the AWS environment with minimal manual oversight.

Optimized Deployment Pipelines

Reduced deployment times and minimized human errors through fully automated CI/CD pipelines, enhancing scalability and reliability.

Customer Testimonials

Applied AI Consulting's expertise in Terraform and Ansible has been pivotal in automating our AWS infrastructure. Their solutions have significantly reduced manual intervention and minimized human errors, leading to a more secure and compliant environment.
Head of Engineering Leading Telecommunication Company

Accelerating Integration with a Robust API Platform: How a Leading Automation Provider Transformed Their Processes Using AWS Services

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 16:28:07 +0000

Accelerating Integration with a Robust API Platform: How a Leading Automation Provider Transformed Their Processes Using AWS Services

Streamlining Operations: Leveraging AWS to Enhance Automation Through a Powerful API Platform

Company Overview

A leading company in the automation platform domain, this organization provides innovative solutions for enterprise automation, including digital transformation, process improvement, and growth strategies. Their platform addresses complex challenges such as information access, approval processes, high transaction volumes, and compliance issues. The company’s integrated payment solutions and process automation tools are revolutionizing enterprises by making operations more efficient and streamlined.

Issue

Time-Consuming Integrations: Building and maintaining point-to-point integrations for each client was resource-intensive and inefficient.

Lengthy Integration Process: Integrating with third-party ERPs and payment systems took 8-12 weeks per client, delaying project timelines.

Limited Scalability: The existing process constrained the ability to serve multiple clients simultaneously, limiting growth.

Need for a Scalable Solution: A scalable, reusable integration framework was required to streamline and accelerate the onboarding process for new clients.

Let’s discuss your use cases

Contact Sales

Similar Use Cases

What Is an AI Maturity Model?

A maturity model is a framework used to assess how well your organization uses a

AAIC + Nisum Partner to Accelerate Enterprise Cloud Transformation with Agentic AI and AWS Innovation

Applied AI Consulting is proud to announce a strategic partnership with Nisum, aimed at delivering

Solution

API-Based Integration Gateway: Implemented a robust API-based Integration Gateway using AWS services like Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and others to streamline integrations.

Custom Solution Architecture: Designed a four-component architecture (Flow, Filter, Transformer, Adopter) to efficiently manage and transform inputs for various ERP systems, enhancing compatibility and flexibility.

Automated CI/CD Pipelines: Established automated CI/CD pipelines to ensure continuous integration and deployment, minimizing manual intervention and enhancing system reliability.

Impact

Accelerated Time-to-Market & Customer Onboarding

Significantly improved the accuracy and efficiency of email content classification and follow-ups. Reduced integration and deployment times by 80%, enabling faster rollout of new features and rapid onboarding of new clients in under a week.

Operational Efficiency & Cost Savings

Automated over 30 tasks and implemented a reusable integration framework, leading to a 60% increase in efficiency and a 40% reduction in operational costs.

Scalability & Enhanced User Experience

Scalable architecture supported increased workloads and customer demands, while a simplified, user-friendly interface improved client satisfaction and expanded customer capacity by 80%.

Customer Testimonials

The API platform developed by Applied AI Consulting has been a game-changer for us. It has significantly reduced manual efforts and errors, enabling us to onboard 80% more customers with ease. Their work has truly elevated our capabilities.
CTO 7Targets.ai

Capital Market Platform Journey to Enhanced Scalability and Efficiency

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 15:27:41 +0000

Transforming Financial Services with AWS: Capital Market Platform Journey to Enhanced Scalability and Efficiency

Seamlessly Modernizing and Scaling a Capital Market Platform on AWS with Enhanced Monitoring and Collaboration

Company Overview

A leading financial services company focused on global emerging markets, this organization delivers up-to-date market insights from major financial centers to local investors. Known for its intelligence-driven approach, the company provides valuable information to help investors navigate diverse market conditions effectively. The company is committed to leveraging advanced technologies to enhance its services and maintain a competitive edge in the financial sector.

Issue

Migrating and modernizing the content management application to AWS.

Implementing AWS cloud operations and DevOps for continuous integrations and deployments.

Enhancing scalability and reliability of the applications.

Setting up efficient monitoring and operations dashboards.

Let’s discuss your use cases

Contact Sales

Similar Use Cases

What Is an AI Maturity Model?

A maturity model is a framework used to assess how well your organization uses a

AAIC + Nisum Partner to Accelerate Enterprise Cloud Transformation with Agentic AI and AWS Innovation

Applied AI Consulting is proud to announce a strategic partnership with Nisum, aimed at delivering

Solution

Containerized and Scalable Deployment: Containerized the EMFI application using AWS ECS Fargate and set up an ALB for traffic distribution and auto-scaling.

Automated CI/CD and Infrastructure Management: Implemented CI/CD pipelines, automated environment deployments with ASG, and managed AWS services using Terraform.

Enhanced Monitoring and Migration: Established a Datadog dashboard for monitoring and facilitated migration from private GitLab to public GitHub.

Impact

Cloud Migration and Modernization

Successfully migrated the content management application to AWS, modernizing its infrastructure.

Scalability and Reliability

Achieved high scalability and reliability through containerization and automated deployments.

Improved Monitoring and Collaboration

Enhanced system visibility with Datadog and streamlined version control by migrating to GitHub.

Customer Testimonials

Applied AI Consulting’s expertise in building custom AI solutions with ML and NLP, along with their scalable AWS implementation, significantly enhanced our product’s performance. Their innovative approach and commitment to quality have driven tangible improvements, greatly benefiting our customers.
CTO 7Targets.ai

AWS Well-Architected Framework: optimizing productivity, security, and cost of your AWS cloud

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 06:37:49 +0000

AWS gives you all the tools and services you need to build your cloud. The challenge lies in knowing which ones you should use to implement and operate your workloads. One common analogy is that of trying to build a house by walking

into a hardware store and purchasing all the items you need. The first problem is understanding which items you need, the second is understanding how they go together. AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you do all that. Plus, it helps you

understand if your decisions are the correct ones, in other words, will they deliver in terms of performance, security and

cost? In short, the AWS Well-Architected Framework provides a structure to compare your use of AWS with its own best practices.

The Well-Architected Framework is built around six pillars—operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability. It enables customers and partners to evaluate architectures and implement scalable designs.

The Framework includes the AWS Well-Architected Tool, which is available free of cost in the AWS Management Console. It provides a mechanism for evaluating workloads, identifying high-risk issues, and recording improvements.

Through its partner program, AWS also provides access to a network of partners, so you can engage with a partner in your area who can help analyze and review your applications.

Benefits at a Glance

Workloads that follow the AWS Well-Architected framework have the ability to: Build and deploy faster

Mitigate technology risks before they happen Make better informed decisions

Implement AWS-recommended best practice

Pillars

AWS Well-Architected Framework comprises six basic pillars:

Operational Excellence

This pillar focuses on running and monitoring systems, and continuously improving processes and procedures. This includes automating changes, response to events, and setting standards to manage daily operations.

Security

The security pillar is primarily concerned with protecting information and systems. It include information pertaining to confidentiality and integrity of data, managing user permissions, and establishing controls to detect security events.

Reliability

Workloads need to perform as per their intended functions and must be able to recover quickly from failure. Key topics of the reliability pillar include distributed system design, recovery planning, and adaptability to changing requirements.

Performance Efficiency

This pillar focuses on the structure and streamlining of IT computing resources, it includes topics such as selecting resource types and sizes to optimize workloads, to monitor performance, and maintain efficiency as business needs evolve.

Cost Optimization

Key topics in the Cost Optimization pillar include understanding of spendings over time, managing fund allocation, selecting the right type and quantity of resources, and scaling up or down to meet business needs cost-effectively

Sustainability

There are environmental consequences to running cloud workloads, and the sustainability pillar focuses on how to minimize this environmental impact. It includes information about the shared responsibility model for sustainability,

understanding the impact of resources and how to optimize utilization of required resources so as to reduce downstream

impact.

Each of these pillars provides information covering design principles—general and specific. The pillars also provide the information needed to review your AWS infrastructure.

Well-Architected Framework Lenses

Lenses offer a way to consistently compare your architectures against best practices and identify areas for improvement. The AWS Well-Architected Framework Lenses are applied whenever a workload is defined. Workloads may have one or more of the Well-Architected Lenses applied. Each with its own set of questions, best practices, notes, and improvement recommendations.

AWS Well-Architected Framework provides the following lenses:

Serverless Lens

The serverless lens helps you apply best practices when building serverless application workloads on AWS. It covers RESTful microservices, mobile app backends, stream processing, and web applications.

The SaaS Lens

This lens focuses on design, deployment, and architecting of Software as a Service (SaaS) workloads in the AWS Cloud. Use it to apply best practices when building SaaS workloads on AWS.

The FTR Lens

This lens is aims at enabling independent software vendors (ISVs) prepare for a Foundational Technical Review (FTR) in the AWS Partner Network (APN).

It provides questions for ISVs to conduct a workload self-assessment before requesting a review.

Users can also create and use their own custom lenses, or use custom lenses that have been shared with them.

Even if a lens is removed from a workload, the data associated with the lens remains, and is restored if the lens is added back to the workload.

Well-Architected Review

It is recommended that you conduct Well-Architected Reviews periodically to encourage a consistent and structured approach. This will ensure that you get the best return on investment for your efforts.

AWS Partners, like AAIC are qualified by AWS to perform reviews. The process consists of exploring functional and non- functional topics through Q&As, with the objective of qualifying the current state of the workload’s architecture and

implementation.

If you want to be sure you’re getting the most from your AWS cloud, there’s no better way that to conduct a Well- Architected review. Contact AAIC today to get started.

Facilitating DevOps with Application Modernization & Architecture Reboot

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 09:48:16 +0000

The Client

Skyword is a content marketing platform that helps bring brands and their customers closer through high-quality relevant content. Companies can also use the platform to produce and disseminate their own content to improve new customer acquisition, build brand loyalty and sustain interest in what the company does, and how it does it. Skyword maintains a digital publication called Content Standard. The publication offers interesting and original content for public consumption on topics related to content marketing.

Skyword also owns *TrackMaven, *a marketing analytics software that helps marketers compute ROI and improve outcomes on 18 integrated digital and social channels.

Project Goals

Skyword’s IT infrastructure needed to be migrated and modernized. In addition, Skyword was facing challenges in deploying, maintaining, and supporting its existing applications. The company needed to revamp its infrastructure to facilitate automation and DevOps for ongoing upgrades.

The Solution

AAIC engineers team worked with Skyword technical leadership and the Product owner team to develop a modernized business solution which included the following steps:

The application was containerized—i.e. a form of virtualization wherein the application is run in isolated spaces called containers. Containers share OS (unlike Virtual Machines). Everything the application needs to run, i.e. libraries, configuration files, etc., is encapsulated in its container. As a result, the containerized app can run on different types of infrastructure, from bare metal to VMs without any need to refactor it to the particular environment.

Skyword’s application was packaged and bundled as a Docker image before being deployed in Kubernetes (aka, K8s) clusters. This will enable better management, such as rollouts/rollbacks, service discovery, load balancing, storage orchestration, and self-healing (This refers to automatically replacing and restarting containers that fail) and rescheduling containers when nodes die.
Automation and version control are at the heart of all DevOps practices, and to enable this we adopted GitHub as our repository for code and configuration files. These files are also used to implement CI/CD. GitHub Actions would be used to generate Java (JAR) files, which will be packaged as Docker images along with dependant libraries and set up for automated deployment to AWS Auto Scaling Groups on the client’s cloud. (WAR/JAR files are digitally signed to signify the origin of source code, making it easy to developers to identify version, test, and deploy the web application)
To save time that would otherwise be spent in resource management, we templatized setting up of resources using AWS CloudFormation an Infrastructure as Code service that takes care of provisioning and configuring resources, so you don’t have to individually do it each time. CloudFormation eliminates manual errors, speeds up, and simplifies application development, scaling, and application integration.
As part of the testing protocol, we implemented Selenium an open source testing tool to synchronize and orchestrate tests as per pre-set triggers, which were defined in the CI/CD delivery pipeline.
To ensure security was given its just due, we implemented OWASP, an open-source security testing tool. OWASP helps identify diverse vulnerabilities before fresh releases went into production. Monitoring and security go hand in hand, and to enable thorough security, we enabled automated alerts by setting up GitLab with Slack. This would automatically share the status of CI/CD deployments and monitor for failures, reducing the impact on the business. CloudWatch metrics and logs were also used to monitor the system.
From a cost-optimization perspective Lambda functions were written to scale the environment up and down.
TrackMaven dashboard was set up for operations and monitoring

Architecture

Standard 3 Tier architecture was used to save information on clients securely in the Cloud. Clients can log in with appropriate IAM security, Plus Group Rules and Security.

Within AWS architecture, we utilized Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancers combined with Auto Scaling Groups to balance the traffic across multiple instances and automate the creation/termination of instances across multiple Availability Zones.

A number of components were also split out from the current infrastructure to make it more modular and fault-tolerant, while assuring redundancy across several geographic locations.

Tech Stack

AWS Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

S3 is an object storage service. To store the images formatted by the openross application (an fast, open, and dynamic open source image resizer) S3 buckets were used.

AWS Elastic File System (EFS)

EFS is a regional service that stores data across multiple Availability Zones assuring high availability and durability.

AWS Cloudwatch Log Group

Amazon CloudWatch Logs were used to monitor, store, and access application logs.

AWS Application Load Balancer

ALB was used for distributing incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, in multiple Availability Zones.

AWS Route53 Hosted Zones

Route 53, highly available and scalable DNS web service, was used for routing internet traffic to Skyword applications.

AWS Secrets Manager

All of Skyword’s application secrets or properties are stored in AWS Secrets Manager.

AWS Key Management Service

AWS Key Management Service, an AWS managed service was used to create, encrypt, and control master keys used to encrypt data.

AWS Elasticache (Redis)

Amazon ElastiCache is a Redis-compatible in-memory data store service. It was used for session management in Skyword’s web application.

AWS Certificate Manager

It is a service that lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy public and private Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with AWS services and internal connected resources.

AWS System Manager Session Manager

Session Manager is a fully managed AWS Systems Manager capability that lets users manage their EC2 instances, on-premises instances, and virtual machines (VMs) through an interactive one-click browser-based shell or through the AWS CLI.

AWS Identity and Access Management

It was implemented to manage access to AWS services and resources securely.

Application Modernization: Steps & Benefits

AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) was used for the data layer in conjunction with AWS Aurora, a MySQL-compatible Relational Database Management Service which was designed from the ground up to run on AWS.

Deployment Application Instance creation, launch, and updating is managed using AMI (Amazon Machine Image.) In order to update AMI i.e., modifying WAR/JAR files present in the AMI, AMI bakery is used. It also provides support for deploying it into the respective auto-scaling group. AMI deployment is done in a blue-green fashion where a new instance will be launched and only after launch will the older or previous instance will be terminated. AWS Lambda function has been set up in the environment. The Lambda function is responsible for scaling up or scaling down autoscaling groups. It can be scheduled to scale up or scale down at a specific rate.

Version Control

Git VCS was used to manage the versioning of the infrastructure. a Git repository, with all of the relevant setup & configuration scripts, along with any relevant documentation, provides detailed information on how to recreate the infrastructure from scratch. This, combined with CloudFormation, enables the automated creation of almost all architected AWS services.

Migration Benefits

Significant improvement in Uptime, which can be monitored with 3rd party tools and confirmed. Implementation of the new pipeline helps to reduce time of the deployment from 11 mins to 5 mins.

No single point of failure

Ability to innovate

Being on AWS opens up an array of new services and technologies, from new storage engines like Redshift or services like Amazon Machine Learning or Lambda, earlier implementation was taking hours to send notification during data processing & involved manual efforts to reboot k8s pods. AAIC automated this manual task using a lambda service which reduced the resolution time to 15 mins

Integration to other systems like WordPress and third party APIs are simple with this devops solution.

Cost Optimization

With the deployment and output of AWS Migration Evaluator, Skyword was able to see detailed reports of their inventory.

Utilization of resources was analyzed, and this helped in right-sizing the company’s AWS solutions. Some of Skyword’s existing resources were over-provisioned and right-sizing their resources resulted in significant cost savings.

Approx 30-35% reduction in the cost by selecting appropriate instances and deleting unused resources in AWS. Earlier the pods requested cpu and memory was higher which was resulting in high configuration spot instances, optimized solution given by AAIC resulted in this cost reduction.

About AAIC

We are automation experts, with a majority (>60%) of our workforce AWS-certified. We assist you in applying intelligence to the Cloud and DevOps, as our name suggests. Our AWS certified experts create high-performing cloud apps by utilizing intelligence components and smart integrations to accelerate your digital transformation journey.

Architect as a Service | Applied AI Consulting

Automating AWS Architecture for a Leading Telecommunication Company Using Terraform and Ansible

Automating AWS Architecture for a Leading Telecommunication Company Using Terraform and Ansible

Company Overview

Issue

Similar Use Cases

Solution

Impact

Automated Infrastructure Provisioning

Compliance and Security

Optimized Deployment Pipelines

Customer Testimonials

Related services

Accelerating Integration with a Robust API Platform: How a Leading Automation Provider Transformed Their Processes Using AWS Services

Accelerating Integration with a Robust API Platform: How a Leading Automation Provider Transformed Their Processes Using AWS Services

Company Overview

Issue

Similar Use Cases

Solution

Impact

Accelerated Time-to-Market & Customer Onboarding

Operational Efficiency & Cost Savings

Scalability & Enhanced User Experience

Customer Testimonials

Related services

Capital Market Platform Journey to Enhanced Scalability and Efficiency

Transforming Financial Services with AWS: Capital Market Platform Journey to Enhanced Scalability and Efficiency

Company Overview

Issue

Similar Use Cases

Solution

Impact

Cloud Migration and Modernization

Scalability and Reliability

Improved Monitoring and Collaboration

Customer Testimonials

Related services

AWS Well-Architected Framework: optimizing productivity, security, and cost of your AWS cloud

Pillars

Security

Reliability

Performance Efficiency

Cost Optimization

Sustainability

Well-Architected Framework Lenses

Serverless Lens

Related posts

Facilitating DevOps with Application Modernization & Architecture Reboot

The Client

Project Goals

The Solution

Architecture

Tech Stack

Application Modernization: Steps & Benefits

Version Control

Migration Benefits

Ability to innovate

Cost Optimization

About AAIC

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