Array Crew Managed

About Array Crew Company

Filmmaker AVA DuVernay founds array Crew, the mission of this platform is to connect below-the-line crew professionals from various backgrounds with producers and department heads. This platform is accessible in the United States and Canada.

Many major studios like Apple TV, Disney, Discovery, etc., supports Array Crew. They provide free membership for crew members under 600 diverse jobs.

The Challenge

The need for computer resources increased as the Array Crew business grew along with the number of clients, and the company faced issues with scaling, availability and cost. They believe that increasing the number of servers would help their business grow but on the other hand, monitoring many more servers are quiet challenging for them. They wanted us to design, architect and manage their entire IT infrastructure

The Solution

Looking at these factors, we mapped plans to design the architecture and to manage their entire IT infrastructure. We prioritized security and stability and also have plans to help Array Crew achieve regulatory compliance.

Initially, we created Application modernization blueprint to make applications easier to use, browse and operate. Amazon EKS was selected in order to better assist the company’s international growth. We provided round the clock monitoring for AWS infrastructure, applications and also supported DevOps.

The following solutions were additionally offered:

• Proactive management of the cloud components including Virtual Machines, Storage, Network and Security (public subnets, private subnets, security rules, etc.), Identity and Access Management.
• Setting up automatic alerts and notifications to track threshold violation for both services and applications.
• Troubleshooting & root cause analyzation for incidents/faults
• Improving the CI/CD Process.

By leveraged Amazon Web Services (AWS) robust control in major security and compliance framework, we ensured comprehensive security for customer’s critical business applications.

Architecture Diagram

We Don’t Compromise With Security!

We ensured tight security for customers’ critical applications within AWS and suggested best security practices to enhance the protection.

The Benefits

Services we Incorporate

AWS Services

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

We used AWS VPC to launch instances on a private, segregated network. Multiple subnets, route tables, NAT and Internet gateways, as well as NACLs, were supported. In addition, this incorporates the benefits of AWS’ scalable infrastructure and automatic failover from the provisioned virtual private gateway. This service also provides network packet logging with VPC flow logs.

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon Cloudwatch is exclusively built for DevOps engineers and IT managers which helps out in monitoring. We used this service to get complete visibility of AWS resources, applications and services running on AWS. The data is obtained in the form of logs and events.

Amazon SNS

It is generally used to send notifications. The notification content is defined by SNS topic. We used AWS SNS to send notification to the central channel in slack along with Project Manager when there is a change in code pipeline states.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS):

AWS EKS is a managed service, which allows company to run Kubernetes on AWS without having to maintain its own Kubernetes control plane. We used EKS in multiple availability zones that brings high availability to the applications. EKS can offer zero-downtime upgrades, the most recent security patches, and can automatically identify and replace unhealthy nodes. With Amazon EC2 Instances, we can leverage on-demand computing resources in a flexible manner and lower computing costs even more.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Amazon EC2 Amazon EC2: provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Continuum Innovations used EC2 along with autoscaling for EKS nodes group so no of nodes can scale automatically according to the demand.

Amazon Open Search:

OpenSearch enables to easily ingest, secure, search, aggregate, view, and analyze data. These capabilities are popular for use cases such as application search, log analytics, and more. It has open-source product so one can easily modify, extend, monetize and resell based upon their own wish.

Amazon Lambda:

AWS Lambda is an event-driven, serverless computing platform. It is a computing service that runs code in response to events and automatically manages the computing resources required by that code. Continuum used lambda function to send notifications to slack about code pipeline state.

Amazon Code Pipeline:

AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps to automate the release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates. Continuum created multiple code pipelines for multiple repositories based on the branches.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR):

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) is a fully-managed Docker container registry that makes it easy for developers to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images. We created multiple repositories to store the container images build by the code build. These images are used to deploy application in to Kubernetes nodes.

AWS CloudFormation:

AWS CloudFormation is a service that helps to model and set up AWS resources so that we can spend less time managing those resources and more time focusing on applications that run in AWS. We create a template that describes all the AWS resources that we want and CloudFormation takes care of provisioning and configuring the resources. We mostly used CloudFormation to provision AWS services for infrastructure.

Third-Party Tools

Datadog: It is a monitoring and analytics tool for information technology (IT) and DevOps teams that can be used to determine performance metrics as well as event monitoring for infrastructure and cloud services.

PagerDuty: PagerDuty is an alarm aggregation and dispatching service for system administrators and support teams. It collects alerts from monitoring tools and gives an overall view of all monitoring alarms, and alerts an on-duty engineer if there’s a problem.

Slack: Slack is a messaging app that connects people to the information that they need. Slack makes it easy to contact your colleagues – one can message anyone inside or outside your organization and collaborate. People can work in dedicated spaces called channels, which bring the right people and information together.

Impact

Array Crew needs and requirements were perfectly figured out and tackled. With our innovative solution with Amazon EKS and CI/CD the duration for application deployment is reduced to 30 minutes from hours to days. Array Crew is now focus on developing their business rather than thinking about cloud infrastructure