The StormIT team has been working with a client in the renewable energy industry for a number of years, mainly on AWS DevOps (Amazon Web Services Development and Operations). As is common for clients, when their architecture had grown, it had become hard to stay in sync with AWS best practices because quick changes had been made to meet customer needs. That’s why we decided to conduct semi-regular comprehensive reviews of their architecture, utilizing the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
This case study outlines the technical outcomes of our collaboration to optimize their infrastructure across various Well-Architected pillars, Operational Excellence, Security, Cost Optimization, Reliability, and Performance Efficiency.
Technical outcomes of the Well-Architected review with a renewable energy industry client
This client has an extensive team of developers and they migrated the major part of their infrastructure into AWS for its reliability and scalability. Their infrastructure is growing steadily and consistent checks are required to ensure it remains in line with AWS best practices.
Operational excellence pillar
Key company employees actively participated in the evaluation process, ensuring alignment with industry requirements. Ownership of resources within the workload was directly assigned, promoting accountability. Version control and multiple environments were implemented to track changes transparently. Thorough testing in EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), environments validated changes. Pre-production testing mirrored production configurations, minimizing risks during deployment.
Security pillar
The company adopted several security best practices in its AWS environment. Resource segregation was implemented using a multi-account strategy. AWS Secrets Manager was used to minimize credential exposure.
IAM access control was clearly defined, adhering to the principle of least privilege. Comprehensive traffic control and encryption were enforced for better network security. Communication with applications utilized HTTPS, with certificates securely managed via AWS Certificate Manager.
Cost optimization pillar
Cost-effective architectural decisions were made, optimizing resource utilization. A review identified the possibility of using spot instances in non-production environments, leading to substantial cost savings.
Our standard practice involves using the smallest instance types when provisioning AWS resources, whether it be EC2 instances, RDS, or EKS.
We also checked all data transfer modeling, mainly between EKS nodes and inside AWS regions, and identified cost-effective approaches.
Reliability and Performance Efficiency pillar
Awareness of default quotas was heightened, with proactive management of quota increase requests. We migrated mission-critical domains to Route 53, improving domain management and application load balancer integration.
Load balancing is used to efficiently distribute traffic across multiple resources (EC2 instances). By doing so, the customer leverages the scalability and elasticity that the AWS Cloud offers. Load balancing is also used for tasks like offloading encryption termination and rules evaluation, resulting in enhanced performance, reliability, and efficient traffic management.
Monitoring tools such as Kubernetes Dashboard and Prometheus-Grafana were employed to ensure system reliability.
Conclusion
Through the AWS Well-Architected Framework, the company achieved significant improvements across various pillars, enhancing the efficiency, security, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of its AWS infrastructure. This comprehensive review and our continuous DevOps work ensure their continued success in the renewable energy industry.
