After over a four years in the cloud, Syarah wanted to revisit its IT architecture, implement the latest cloud technologies, and prepare for the next stage in its life cycle. With slashTEC’s help, Syarah was able to make critical updates with immediate financial impact and enhance the performance of its core platform significantly.
The Challenge
Syarah was born in the cloud. At the time, it implemented the best cloud services and technologies available, which enabled Syarah to become the successful provider of point of sales solutions that it is today. However, cloud computing has taken many steps forward over the last decade. Public cloud platforms, like AWS, have invested in countless new features that allow modern businesses to access powerful capabilities, including Big Data analytics, container orchestration, auto-scaling groups, and more, without needing to develop them in house. Syarah decided it was time to modernize its cloud environment so it could maximize its usage of these crucial capabilities. slashTEC’s cloud experts stepped in and identified several ways Syarah could revamp its cloud infrastructure on AWS with great help from Syarah's CTO and the great development team. Syarah's agreed to modernize on AWS and follow slashTEC’s lead throughout the execution.
The Solution
SlashTEC used the five-pillar AWS Well-Architected framework to hone in on opportunity areas for Syarah. The five pillars include Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization. slashTEC believed several strategic updates would be tremendously valuable for Syarah across the reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization pillars, specifically.
Architecture Assessment
After conducting an in-depth review using the AWS Well-Architected framework, slashTEC found several single points of failure, right-sizing inconsistencies, and unused resources across Syarah's cloud architecture. Syarah had several workloads with different sizes, as well as idle load balancers, Elastic IP, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. slashTEC adjusted utilization to realign computing demand with resource consumption and removed unused instances where appropriate. With these simple changes, POSRocket was able to reduce monthly IT spend by approximately 30%.
Containerization and Orchestration Optimization
After slashTEC’s involvement, Syarah had started to migrate certain workloads to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Syrah's CTO and slashTEC’s Team recognize that Syarah could further optimize its EKS cluster in several ways. SlashTEC implemented AWS Auto Scaling groups to create highly available and elastic worker nodes, as well as centralized monitoring system for the cluster and centralized logging system to centralize event collection from various log sources on Kubernetes , and POSRocket’s micro services. Syarah and SlashTEC’s experts also integrated AWS Appconfig Service with every micro service deployment in the CI/CD process to store sensitive application information. Moreover, slashTEC migrated Syarah EC2 instances to a containers running in several AWS Kubernetes clusters. Through load testing and auto-scaling, SlashTEC achieved a 30% reduction in monthly expense while simultaneously increasing the reliability, security, and performance of POSRocket’s platform.
The Benefits
By engaging with slashTEC, Syarah was able to revitalize its cloud architecture without moving any workloads away from AWS. Syarah's Cloud infrastructure is now more scalable, cost-efficient, reliable, and secure, due to the AWS features that slashTEC implemented. Overall, Syarah was able to reduce cloud expenditures by 25%. The company is better positioned to evolve throughout the 2022 as the cloud point of sales sector continues to explode. On top of that, Syarah can easily incorporate future cloud advances into its Cloud infrastructure and innovate at will in a highly competitive industry.
