The Solution

Security

•  A careful evaluation of Spartan's infrastructure revealed areas for improvement in security. While enhancing server security, we replaced overly permissive security rules with more restrictive ones.
•  Our audits indicated several IAM users whose access keys were older than 90 days. As part of standard IAM security best practices, we recommended rotating the IAM user access keys which were older than 90 days. This measure was crucial in reducing the chances of any outside intrusions into the AWS console.

Performance efficiency

•  The network connections to RDS were initially established over the public internet, which imposed several challenges to the database security and its network performance. Managing the database security groups was cumbersome, as it was hard to track the public IPs that changed. Moreover, it contributed to increased data transfer costs and latency issues.
•  We established VPC peering, which offered significant improvements in network performance, security, and cost. With VPC peering, network communications were established via private IPs, resulting in improved database security and speed, along with significant cost savings.

Reliability

•  The architectural review of Spartan's AWS environment showed several unevenly distributed EC2 instances across different Availability Zones (AZs).
•  Our team worked on expanding the instances evenly among different AZs, thereby offering inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity between AZs in the same region. This greatly improved the application's resilience and protected it from a single point of failure.

Enhanced scalability

•  Spartan initially had their application hosted on cPanel. However, cPanel is not designed to scale horizontally with AWS, which could cause application availability issues. We helped them modernize their existing architecture by implementing AWS Elastic Beanstalk, along with autoscaling and load balancing. These improvements ensured high application availability and better price performance. The introduction of autoscaling facilitated better cost management while meeting their traffic demands.

Managed Services

•  As a managed service provider, we have always been proactively involved in performing AWS Well-Architected reviews to build a highly efficient and fault-tolerant infrastructure for Spartan. We also perform monthly account audits to assess Spartan’s AWS environment and ensure that it is compliant with best practices. Our support team is available 24/7 for any technical assistance.