Project Brief

The purpose of the project was to build a scalable, resilient, production-ready digital infrastructure to handle a load of peak hours in any scenario. Scalability, high availability, disaster recovery, agility, and accessibility were crucial to the implementation of the project.

The Challenge

The primary challenge was the lack of robust, reliable, well-architected cloud infrastructure that would allow The Client to operate and support its clients. Limitations on scale, security and loss of revenue were forcing The Client to seek alternative solutions. The Client had previously struggled with a mix of on-premises and Rackspace infrastructural challenges. Consequently in the scope of modernization and scalable business growth, they decided to move their workload to AWS.

Our Solution

Based on our discovery session, our architects suggested migrating the application, refactoring and improving it in AWS according to the platform designed for the application. The process started with lifting and shifting the environment to a secure, scalable PCI- and SOCII-ready AWS account using the AWS Migration hub with CloudEndure.

In stage two, our engineers focused on the correct sizing of the servers and adding more instances to server pools behind the F5 load balancer. In the meantime, we imported all servers and configurations into HashiCorp Terraform infrastructure as code and Ansible for configuration management.

In stage three of the migration, our cloud experts optimized the workload and created an autoscaling group to scale out infrastructure and improve user experience during the peak time of the year.

In the design process for new digital infrastructure, our engineers created a new blueprint for the AWS environment, ensuring compliance with PCI V3, SOCII, and ISO 27001. Mars Innovations Technologies delivered automated provisioning of infrastructure components and services using Hashicorp Terraform infrastructure as code (IaC) and Ansible for configuration management.

We migrated all servers from RackSpace to AWS, enabling auto-scaling and F5 configuration for all auto-scaling servers. Mars Innovations Technologies designed, implemented, and maintained an efficient, highly scalable hybrid cloud agnostic CICD pipeline using Jenkins pipeline as code, Github for AWS, Azure, and an on-premises data center.

Cloud Architect designed and implemented service discovery using HashiCorp Consul. From there, we implemented AWS Secrets Manager to enhance sensitive data security, and created a hybrid data security management using HashiCorp Vault. Overall, we delivered production HA, DR, and highly scalable, multi-region solutions.

Value Delivered

Our well-designed digital platform allows Clearly to seamlessly scale the company workload to desired volumes. It features excellent resilience and security, bringing historic, record-breaking sales to the company.

The new AWS hybrid environment reduced operational costs by 47 percent and increased peak-season revenue by 390%.

Results

1. Sales made on the Clearly websites increased to a record-breaking high for their season
2. A scaling out infrastructure group was created and the workload was optimized
3. User experience has improved