Array Crew

Case Study: Array Managed Service – Challenges, Solutions and Benefits

Bycontinuum

About ARRAY CREW 

ARRAY CREW is an equal opportunity platform, with a mission to support professionals in the film and television industry from underrepresented populations.  

Why Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services was the ideal platform for ARRAY CREW to meet all of its objectives. ARRAY CREW needs a responsive application that can expand based on demand and provide uninterrupted service to end-users. AWS has a track record of providing a safe and reliable service. Because of these factors, AWS is the best option for ARRAY CREW. 

The Challenge 

As the company’s business grew, along with an increase in the number of customers the need for computing resources increased, and the company faced scaling, availability, agile, reliability and cost challenges. The company found that increasing the number of servers to support business growth delivered diminishing returns on computing performance but limited the ability to scale efficiently along with cost-effectively. 

The Solution 

Application modernization is a blueprint for how to make your applications easier to use, browse, operate, and optimize in order to take use of the latest technologies.  

We chose Amazon EKS to better support the company’s global expansion. It became compatible after switching to Amazon EKS.  

we provided 24/7 monitoring of AWS Infrastructure, monitoring of applications, support for AWS services, and DevOps support. 

In addition, the following solutions were provided as well, 

  • 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 auto alerts and notifications to monitor threshold violations including application and service. 
  • Troubleshooting & root cause analysis for incidents/faults. 
  • Enhancing CI/CD process. 

Security and Compliance 

By leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) robust control in major security and compliance frameworks, we ensured comprehensive security for customers’ business-critical applications in AWS and advised AWS best practices to strengthen their security. 

The Benefits 

  • High availability: The reliability and redundancy of the solution on AWS have ensured almost 100 percent availability. 
  • Zero downtime: Moved the application to EKS. EKS can automatically detect and replace unhealthy nodes, as well as provide zero-downtime upgrades and the most recent security fixes. 
  • Scalability: The application can be scaled based on the spikes in traffic using AWS. 
  • Agile: With the Amazon EKS and CI/CD, changes can be implemented in about 30 minutes, compared to the multiple hours or even days applications require to review the code, get approval, and deploy the fix. 
  • Cost Optimized: With Amazon EC2 Instances, we can also employ on-demand computing resources more flexibly and save money on computing. 
  • Security and Compliance: We are constantly improving infrastructure security with AWS best practices to strengthen their security.

AWS Services Used For Array Crew

Continuum Innovations used the following services to execute this project successfully 

  • AWS EKS is a managed service, which allows the company to run Kubernetes on AWS without having to maintain its own Kubernetes control plane. 
  • Amazon ECR is an AWS-managed container image registry service that is secure, scalable, and reliable. We used Amazon ECR to store the container images in private repositories. 
  • Amazon OpenSearch Service Domains are clusters with the settings, instance types, instance counts, and storage resources that you specify. Array Crew consists of the domains for each environment. 
  • AWS Code Build is a fully managed build service that builds the container images for ARRAY CREW and uploads those images to the ECR Container repository and applies the deployments to the EKS. 
  • AWS Code Pipeline is a continuous delivery service that is used to model, visualize, and automate the steps required to release ARRAY CREW software. ARRAY CREW can quickly model and configure the different stages of a software release process. Code Pipeline automates the steps required to release software changes continuously. 
  • Amazon VPC helped in setting up the private network with AWS as it provided isolation and security. 
  • Amazon CloudFront was used to speed up the distribution of static and dynamic web content to the users. 
  • AWS CloudFormation helped in the deployment mirroring for the production, development, and staging environments. 

And we also used various services like Amazon SNS, security groups, autoscaling, AWS Lambda, etc. To know more about our services and how we make personalized plans for different clients, visit Continuum Innovations.Â