Whizlabs is one of the renowned online training providers with a diverse range of product offerings. The company has been serving as a crucial support for many candidates in realizing their dreams of a promising career. In a span of over 18 years, Whizlabs has helped over 5 million professionals with success in their careers. However, the year 2017 proved a milestone in the history of Whizlabs, as we decided to revamp our server and took a step ahead.
At that time, Whizlabs turned to EasyDeploy so the Whizlabs experts along with EasyDeploy experts could take some actions for making improvements in the server. EasyDeploy is known as a popular AWS consulting partner and an alternative for cloud solutions architect with experience in private cloud, public cloud, and containers.
EasyDeploy has considerable expertise in various AWS services such as EC2, ECS, S3, RDS, RedShift, and others. We are really grateful to EasyDeploy to be our AWS consulting partner and so, here we’ll elaborate on how did Whizlabs and EasyDeploy team worked together to architect the Whizlabs server!
Where did Whizlabs and EasyDeploy Start to Revamp Whizlabs Server?
So, let us first discuss the points Whizlabs and EasyDeploy teams discovered to work upon in order to improve the working of the Whizlabs server. Instability was the first thing that came to the attention of EasyDeploy in the Whizlabs server. Furthermore, EasyDeploy also noted that the server had some antiquated configurations. So, EasyDeploy and Whizlabs team worked together and developed a new server for Whizlabs, and migrated the entire code of Whizlabs to the new server. However, it was not enough!
The code from the old server was obsolete and, therefore, required higher computing power. This cascading effect further imposed on the costs and operational costs became higher because of the higher computing power. Did the problem stop here? No! The Whizlabs application was slow despite the higher computing power. At this point, both EasyDeploy and Whizlabs were back right where they started!
Improving the Core Capabilities
The second phase of improvising the Whizlabs server started in mid-2018. Before that, the teams focused on the optimization of the code for solving the issue of slow application. The developers at Whizlabs and EasyDeploy worked on it by leveraging the latest technology. Then, EasyDeploy helped Whizlabs team to migrate its server to the Laravel framework.
As a result, the problem of higher computing power was solved. Subsequently, the operational costs decreased, and for the first time, the server was on stable ground. The next point of attention was the server downtime. Upon investigation, the teams noted that the massive volume of data in the database was the culprit.
Therefore, EasyDeploy and Whizlabs teams decided to switch the Whizlabs database to Aurora RDS serverless. The experience of EasyDeploy with Aurora RDS helped Whizlabs in reducing operational costs further. How? EasyDeploy’s Aurora RDS has a micro reserved instance type for dev instance supports running the application for development.
Furthermore, the serverless capabilities of Aurora RDS with autoscaling helped in load testing as well as auto pausing during the inactive state of the database. Also, the autoscaling capabilities of Aurora RDS serverless played a crucial role in the reduction of operational costs.
Autoscaling enabled scaling up the capabilities of the RDS at peak times of the traffic demands of the application. Similarly, the RDS could also scale down when the traffic decreases. Since Whizlabs provides various promotional offers from time to time, EasyDeploy helped Whizlabs considerably by preventing downtime.
Fixed CDN Costs
The intervention by EasyDeploy in the Whizlabs server in the content delivery network (CDN) is also one of the notable highlights of EasyDeploy’s plan for addressing the problems of Whizlabs. The variable billing for the CDN of Whizlabs was responsible for unnecessary costs. Therefore, EasyDeploy and Whizlabs teams together brought a solution to maintain fixed costs for the CDN.
By switching from Amazon CloudFront to Cloudflare, the CDN cost did not vary and was considerably lower than the variable charges. Now, the server of Whizlabs was in perfect shape as compared to earlier after completing the first phase of the Whizlabs server process. However, the game was not yet over! Now, Whizlabs and EasyDeploy teams had to dive deeper to solve the operational and cost-related issues with the server of Whizlabs.
And the Road Ahead!
The next course of action for EasyDeploy to solve the problems with Whizlabs’ server was to reduce the costs of the EC2 instances alongside improving their performance. First of all, the EC2 instances of EasyDeploy provide ample benefits that account for their credibility. Let us take a look at some of the other features of EC2 instances of EasyDeploy to understand the benefits.
- The validation of the EasyDeploy server, according to the Center for Internet Security Standards (CISS) benchmarks.
- The assurance of security through a web application firewall.
- Periodic patching for updates in security and new features.
- Round the clock automated monitoring for ensuring 99.9% uptime for applications.
- Automated backup for maintaining the redundancy of website data.
- The facility of Git support for easier deployment.
- Free SSL for the Whizlabs web application. This helps in the encryption of communications between end-users and the application.
- Delivery of server audit reports to customers every week for transparency with the help of metrics for usage and security of the Whizlabs server.
- The performance-optimized server offers better speed for the web application alongside managing requests with limited computing resources.
Tweaks in the EC2 Instances
Cost benefits with periodic cost optimization and EC2 autoscaling, as well as spot instances, are also the prominent benefits of EasyDeploy’s EC2 instances. Periodic cost optimization helps in maintaining a low cloud infrastructure cost. Spot instances help in reducing operational costs by almost 70%. Therefore, the teams plan on migrating almost 80% of the EC2 instance computing power to spot instances.
Also, EasyDeploy aims at migrating the instances to dockerized applications along with the implementation of autoscaling to ensure cost reduction. Another crucial initiative in EasyDeploy’s plans for the Whizlabs server is to build CI/CD pipeline through the Jenkins platform. The primary objective underlying this action is to streamline the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) process. As a result, the teams together could be able to speed up the development lifecycle by next year.
Final Words
The collaboration of EasyDeploy and Whizlabs turned out to be one of the crucial milestones in the success of Whizlabs. The legacy in the database and server of Whizlabs were the points that were affecting the performance and stability. In such a scenario, the transformation to cloud serves is the absolute action in addressing the concerns of downtime and higher operational costs in modern websites and applications.
The success of your journey to cloud transformation depends on the selection of the right consultant and service partner. Therefore, careful observation of the knowledge, skills, and abilities of a reliable AWS Consulting Partner such as EasyDeploy can help you get the best experience.
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