Using Well-Architected Framework to Advance CI/CD Strategy

Growth Over Time Learning (gotLearning) is an education startup that recently developed the first Collaborative Learning System (CLS) as a learning conversation platform between students, teachers and all other educational professionals. The client chose AWS to host the application and enhance the availability, scalability, performance, and security as they grow and mature.

Challenge

After launching the beta version of the client’s Collaborative Learning System (CLS), they quickly ran into issues with the application’s performance and the implementation of DevOps into their workflow. The client also realized they had no insights into application performance, or the tools AWS provides for observability — making it extremely challenging to optimize their application on the cloud.

Solution

First, Infinitive conducted a technical review of the gotLearning’s source code and deployment process to find bottlenecks that contributed to the application’s performance issues. Then we worked with the client to complete a Well-Architected Framework Assessment and noted pain points holding the client back such as monitoring, automation/configuration management, security, and disaster recovery.

Infinitive proposed the splitting of the front and backend into their own repositories and containers that would be the first of many refactors to enhance the resilience of the application. It was also found that the development team had no insight on how the application will handle different loads of users or if they are pushing potentially vulnerable code into production before deploying, so performance tests and code scanning tools were demonstrated and recommended to the client.

Infinitive spent most of the time assessing the client’s AWS environment through the WAF Tool and optimizing it for automation and security. Proposed solutions were broken down into their respective WAF Pillar of security, cost optimization, reliability, performance efficiency, and operational excellence.

Outcome

Infinitive provided the client with AWS best-practice implementations that helped them implement and manage CI/CD into their workflow with increased visibility on their application and deployments. Our team enabled the client to remediate issues, deploy features, and manage their product more efficiently — all while aiming to improve the application’s performance and reliability. Specifically, Infinitive:

Established AWS Control Tower Landing Zone with Multi-Account structure and informed client on best practices to build out additional custom LZ features.
Audited the client’s current production Security Group setup and refactored following AWS best practices.
Completed WAF Tool targeted towards client’s production workload in their AWS environment.
Provided client with roadmap containing best practice implementations regarding their application code and AWS environment that cater towards their specific needs of increasing performance, visibility, security, etc.