Backendless is a US-based company that offers a platform for developing mobile applications without the need for coding skills. The platform’s functionality includes tools for creating both the frontend and backend sides, allowing Backendless’s customers to bring their ideas to life without coding skills.

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

The Backendless platform is a popular solution used by hundreds of customers, ranging from small startups to large corporations. Before partnering with SHALB, Backendless allowed customers to deploy the platform in their environments while hosting the installation on a server. However, as more enterprise customers began using public cloud services, Backendless needed to provide the ability to deploy its SaaS within their cloud accounts.

Moreover, Backendless aimed to make their software easily installable. Ideally, they wanted it to be a single command that could enable fast and hassle-free installation on the customer’s side.

Additionally, Backendless had another requirement: to be closer to their customers around the globe, they needed to quickly launch new AWS regions in specific areas. However, this was technically challenging since the company’s infrastructure wasn’t codified. The task required manual reproduction of stack configuration; a lengthy and complex process. Moreover, Backendless was time-constrained as they planned to launch marketing campaigns in new geographic locations soon.

WHY THEY CHOSE US

After evaluating different contractors for the tasks, Backendless decided to choose SHALB. Having been a customer of ours before, they were already highly satisfied with our services. So, when they needed help again, they didn’t hesitate to contact us.

The tasks assigned to us by Backendless included:

• Developing a solution that would enable quick and easy deployment of their enterprise SaaS on the customer’s side.
• Integrating the solution within the complex Backendless system.
• Providing the Backendless team with the ability to swiftly launch AWS regions within new target areas.

PROJECT DELIVERY

During the course of the project, the SHALB team developed a codified solution that enables the quick deployment of a fully-fledged AWS infrastructure with an EKS cluster. The cluster is launched with a pre-installed set of the customer’s software, including databases and workloads, and a monitoring and logging stack is set up.

For the infrastructure deployment and provisioning, we used Cluster.dev – SHALB’s very own solution for managing cloud-native infrastructures. The advantages of using Cluster.dev met all the requirements for this particular project, including:

1. Fast and easy deployment of SaaS. We could have employed Terraform to achieve the same results. However, Cluster.dev has a simpler configuration and, unlike Terraform, allows for a one-command deployment.
2. Saving time on resource validation. Cluster.dev has its own state, which eliminates lengthy validation of AWS resources performed by Terraform every time before applying changes. In large infrastructures with frequent deployments, like that of Backendless, it can save up to two hours of working time per day.
3. Managing complex systems. Backendless has a complex infrastructure with many interconnected resources. Cluster.dev is ideal for managing such systems as it keeps track of interrelations and dependencies among components.

Challenges

According to Roman Progonnyj, the senior DevOps engineer engaged in the project, the hardest part was integrating the developed solution with the customer’s existing stack while complying with its logic. This required developing numerous connecting points that our engineers devised in collaboration with the customer’s team.

To summarize; the SHALB team had to integrate several components together and teach them how to work with one another seamlessly. For example, teach the Backendless workload to work with Cluster.dev and perform additional functions such as creating domains and Ingress controllers in EKS using Kubernetes API, and enabling the Cert manager to access the domain zone in another account. All of this required a high level of technical expertise and collaboration between SHALB and Backendless teams.

PROJECT OUTCOME

After the project’s completion, Backendless gained a fully codified solution for deploying their enterprise SaaS on customers’ cloud accounts. The solution was seamlessly integrated with Backendless’ existing system and complied with its inner logic. This enabled the company to quickly launch new AWS regions in required areas, making it easier to be closer to their customers around the world.

The solution also allowed for fast and easy installation of Backendless’s SaaS on the customer’s side, which now takes less than an hour. A one-command launch eliminates the need for lengthy and complex manual reproducing of stack configurations, while a high level of automation minimizes chances of human-induced errors.

Building infrastructure code with Cluster.dev simplifies its further management and has certain advantages compared to Terraform.

CONCLUSION

The SHALB team has the knowledge and skills for building infrastructures of any complexity. So, if you have any problems with your existing infrastructure, don’t hesitate to contact us. Book an online meeting or contact sales@shalb.com for more information. We’ll be happy to hear from you!

The post Revolutionizing Enterprise SaaS Deployment: How Backendless Achieved Swift and Seamless Installation with SHALB appeared first on SHALB.

Concert.ua is one of Ukraine’s leading event ticketing agencies. The company handles almost half of the country’s online ticket sales. For its business to thrive and remain competitive, Concert.ua needs to provide fast and consistent services that will keep its customers happy.

Problem description

Before going serverless with AWS, Concert.ua’s systems were already in the cloud, but they were not optimized for it. It was a legacy infrastructure running on virtual machines that was inefficient and unable to handle sudden traffic spikes.

Announcements of upcoming events attract a huge number of visitors and increase the website’s traffic up to 1,000 percent within minutes. Although Concert.ua’s technical staff planned for such activity spikes in advance, it was hard to estimate the precise number of resources. “Even when a traffic spike was expected, it was always a guess as to how many servers we’d need,” says Yevgen Lysenko, founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Concert.ua. “But there was no other option with the resources and technologies we had at the time.”

With databases flooded with queries and services not responding, customers were faced with delays waiting for their transactions to proceed. Needless to say, this affected the company’s reputation and revenue.

Managing infrastructure was becoming a troublesome and time-consuming task. As a result, Concert.ua was looking for a way to resolve these issues and free up its developers to focus on application enhancement rather than infrastructure troubleshooting.

SHALB, a long-term technical partner of Concert.ua and a certified AWS associate, suggested the company’s transition to AWS out-of-the-box services and offered its help in migration.

Project implementation

SHALB engineers automated the customer’s cloud setup by implementing an Infrastructure as Code approach using Terraform. With infrastructure resources defined in code, the Concert.ua’s systems became easily reproducible, scalable, and manageable from configuration files.

The customer’s applications were containerized and prepared for running serverless on a combined platform. The solution brought together Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), an automated tool for container orchestration, and AWS Fargate, a serverless pay-as-you-go compute engine.

The combination with Fargate made it possible to achieve the fault tolerance of ECS-running applications while also enabling the possibility of their infinite scaling to accommodate sudden traffic spikes.

The customer’s MySQL databases were migrated to Amazon Aurora, a relational database service designed for working in the cloud. The transition to Aurora DB significantly improved the performance of Concert.ua’s databases, making them scalable and capable of efficiently handling customer requests, even when traffic is high.

Employing AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service allows Concert.ua to concurrently process multiple transactions in real time; customers now receive their tickets straight away upon completion of a transaction with no additional waiting time.

Also, using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda dramatically reduced the time it takes for the Concert.ua’s developers to implement APIs. “We couldn’t launch APIs as quickly as we can now,” says Lysenko. “Previously, we had to do a lot of coding but now it’s 300–500 percent faster. Using AWS, our software development cycle takes less time and effort, by fewer people. And it costs less than our previous setup.”

Business results

Since migration to a scalable architecture built on AWS, Concert.ua has increased the reliability and availability of its systems. The company’s website is now secured against sudden traffic spikes and reports 99.9 percent uptime.

Transition to a serverless platform allowed Concert.ua to cut its infrastructure costs and improve customers’ ticket-purchasing experience.

SHALB is proud to be a part of the Concert.ua success story. After all, our teammates are keen event-goers themselves and are the first to appreciate the fast and reliable services of Concert.ua!

SHALB is a certified AWS partner eligible to provide consultancy services and build infrastructures in the Amazon cloud platform. Our expert staff can advise on any kind of cloud-related questions, including migration and optimization of cloud cost and services, to building large scale distributed systems.

The post The highly efficient serverless platform for Ukraine’s largest ticketing agency appeared first on SHALB.

LotusFlare is a high-tech US company that provides a cloud digital commerce and monetization service for communications and media service providers. Having started as a mobile internet provider for areas with limited internet access, LotusFlare has grown to become one of the leading players on the US telecom market.

The company develops its own SaaS and operates the in-house built stack to provide cloud digital services to their customers. LotusFlare is dedicated to cloud native, which underlies the company’s development cycle and their core products.

WHY THEY CHOSE US

As a growing telecom business, LotusFlare needed the ability to quickly launch new environments for connecting more customers to their cloud. The company had been working on creating a platform that would allow them to launch and provide typical infrastructures for each customer.

At the stage of the platform design, LotusFlare realized the need for a technical consultancy. SHALB was chosen for the job because of our experience and comprehensive knowledge in the field of cloud native products. “Cloud native has an impressive abundance of products and services, – explained Volodymyr Tsap, CTO at SHALB. – Working with different customers makes us constantly grow our expertise on the variability of available tools. So it was a wise decision to reach out to SHALB for expert advice.”

REQUIREMENTS

Together with the LotusFlare team we started working towards our common goal: designing a resilient platform for deploying cloud environments. Among key customer requirements were high availability, automated deployments, and simple cluster upgrades.

TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION

As a company actively engaged in software development, LotusFlare already had a well-running system of software delivery and deployment. They used Kubernetes managed services to run their workloads on AWS, and a GitOps CI for cluster deployments.

However, the problem with Kubernetes managed solutions is that they are usually a few versions behind the official release cycle. This means that the newly released functions are unavailable until they are adopted by the provider. Also, having no access to master nodes restricted the LotusFlare team from using some services that they needed. Taking all this into consideration, LotusFlare concluded that they needed self-managed clusters.

We suggested K3s as a cluster management utility. Based on our research, it had more advanced characteristics in terms of resilience and security than other tools.

Evaluation of Kubernetes control plane utilities as of 2020:

In order to make the process of cluster upgrades easier, we introduced the technology of rolling upgrades, where each of the cluster nodes is being upgraded in turn without service interruption. Moreover, each cluster deployment/upgrade is then followed by conformity tests that validate the cluster compliance to production demands.

We enhanced the K3s internal security features by using the Cilium CNI network plugin and integration with OpenID Connect. This way we restricted access from workloads to the K8s cluster and added a user-identity layer on top of the authorization system.

The clusters are failover-aware and run in several availability zones at the same time. This ensures the system remains available even if one of the DCs inside the availability zone fails.

PROJECT OUTCOME

Together with the LotusFlare team we created a core orchestration platform that is quick to deploy and easy to upgrade. The platform provides automated deployment of self-managed Kubernetes clusters to the cloud. You can think of it as a customized installer that allows for easy reproduction of infrastructures. LotusFlare are now able to roll out environments and set them up for new customers much faster than before.

Full control over system configuration and components allows LotusFlare engineers to use the cutting-edge Kubernetes version and try out the latest features available. The state-of-the-art technology stack ensures that the company stays technologically advanced and ahead of its competition.

The company has been using the platform in production for over a year and is extremely satisfied with the results. What’s more, the LotusFlare team has been constantly fine-tuning the initial solution so that it completely aligns with the company’s needs. Commenting on the project, Volodymyr Tsap said: “LotusFlare has a top-notch professional in-house team. We did mostly research and prototyping code, while they elaborated the rest of it.”

Our experience with LotusFlare proves that sometimes even the most tech-savvy team needs friendly advice. Any questions concerning infrastructure development, maintenance, or support? Get in touch because SHALB engineers love such tasks! Book an online meeting or contact sales@shalb.com for more information.

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