Intro
Helioz Technologies builds apps and offers CAD services to industrial manufacturers. They started with an online application, zipCPQ, and later created Pallet Insights, an app for pallet recycling and transportation.
Company faced a challenge with their AWS setup for a US project. They saw the potential in AWS, but needed help to use it more effectively. They wanted to focus more on their core business and enhance their AWS environment’s security and efficiency.
To help them, we carried out an AWS Well-Architected review. This review was crucial in optimizing their AWS services, improving security, and allowing them to concentrate more on their core operations.
The Problem
Helioz Technologies had an existing AWS environment for an important project in the US. The company wanted to free internal resources to focus on core business and raise the quality of the AWS environment. The company liked the AWS ecosystem but needed expert guidance to leverage AWS’s potential effectively.
The company recognized the need to optimize its solution in line with AWS’s established best-practices. They needed to enhance security, efficiency, and reliability, so they sought external expertise to maximize AWS’s potential.
Why AWS cloud?
Helioz Technologies chose AWS cloud services for this project due to its exceptional scalability and global availability, perfectly matching project requirements.
Additionally, they were attracted to the cost-effectiveness and robust security measures inherent in AWS. Helioz Technologies recognized AWS as a solution that not only catered to their current requirements but also presented a platform capable of adapting and scaling for the future.
Scalability
With AWS tools such as Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing, it is easy to scale up or down based on the demand to ensure high performance all the time.
Cost-Effectiveness
With AWS, clients only pay for the actual resource consumption without long-term contracts or up-front commitments.
Reliability
AWS cloud runs on a scalable, reliable, and secure global computing infrastructure that ensures that critical services run reliably.
Security
AWS utilizes an end-to-end approach to secure and harden the cloud infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures.
Solution Description
To address Helioz Technologies’ needs, we conducted an AWS Well-Architected review, providing a comprehensive assessment of their existing infrastructure to ensure optimal alignment with AWS best practices.
Monitoring and Alarming
We introduced additional monitoring and alarming capabilities for the AWS Simple Mail Service. Alongside this, we also assumed the responsibility of first-level support for incidents, providing quick and effective solutions whenever required.
Security
During our review, we discovered a high-risk issue with the MySQL RDS. To address this problem, we recommended tightening security by configuring a security group inbound rule that allows only specific EC2 instances and predetermined IP ranges. This move is crucial in bolstering the overall security infrastructure, thereby protecting sensitive information.
Backup/Restore
To safeguard their data, we configured RDS backup replication to a secondary availability zone (US East - N. Virginia). In addition to this, we implemented automated backups for the production database and ensured secure storage with S3 backup. This strategy not only provided redundancy but also offered a robust disaster recovery plan that satisfied company-defined RPO and RTO.
AWS Well-Architected Framework
In the delivery of this service, we used AWS Well-Architected Framework. The AWS Well-Architected Framework describes key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for designing and running workloads in the cloud. It is built around six pillars - operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.
