Kinetic +
Leveraging Well-Architected Reviews to Build Cloud Excellence
About
Kinetic + is an innovative and industry-leading software development company that specialises in design and creation of bespoke digital platforms for the sports and physical activity sector. Working with some of the largest local authorities and commercial activity and leisure providers in the UK, its solutions have revolutionised the management, delivery and insight reporting of participation data across a myriad of sport and physical activity sessions.
Its Swimphony platform is an award-winning swimming software solution that facilitates the management, delivery, and evaluation of learn-to-swim programmes and national curriculum school swimming programmes.
The Challenge
Kinetic+ wanted external consultants to initiate a review of its AWS infrastructure. The review aimed to assess the current system for resilience, redundancy, and data security, and recommend any necessary improvements to align it more closely with best practices.
Additionally, Kinetic+ was highly conscious of its AWS spend. The business wanted to ensure that its AWS expenditure was being utilised efficiently and that it wasn’t missing out on any potential cost-saving opportunities.
The Kinetic+ team sought help from Validated AWS Partner Ubertas Consulting to provide expert advice and guidance in optimising the AWS infrastructure, aligning it with best practices, and identifying cost-saving opportunities.
The Solution
Ubertas Consulting conducted a Well-Architected Framework Review of the Swimphony environment. In keeping with the challenges brought by the customer, the review highlighted issues relating to the Operational Excellence and Cost Optimisation pillars.
Over three days of remediation, Ubertas worked closely with Kinetic’s in-house development team to implement improvements to each pillar.
Operational Excellence
- AWS CodePipelines was configured with Github, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeDeploy. This is an end-to-end software release solution that automates code deployment using CI/CD methodology, from source code changes to deployment in production.
- EC2 Auto Scaling was implemented to provide a dynamic and automated way to manage EC2 instances. It is a service that automatically scales Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions defined by the user. It can scale capacity based on CPU utilisation, memory utilisation, custom metrics, or scheduled actions.
- Blue/Green deployment methodology was introduced to provide releases with near-zero downtime and rollback capabilities. Simply put, this strategy creates two separate but identical environments. One environment (blue) is running the current version, and one environment (green) is running the new version. Once testing has been completed on the green environment, live application traffic is directed to the green environment and the blue environment is deprecated.
Cost Optimisaton
- A Savings Plan was introduced to control the cost of continuously running On-Demand EC2 Instances, with the organisation committing to a fixed dollars-per-hour usage calculated over a one-year term.
The Benefits
AWS CodePipeline will reduce the risk of human errors, increase the speed and frequency of deployments, improve code quality, increase developer productivity and reduce costs.
AWS CodeBuild with AWS CodeDeploy will provide a robust and reliable approach for deploying application changes while minimising downtime, reducing risk, and enabling thorough testing and validation – particularly valuable for their mission-critical applications and services.
EC2 auto scaling ensures high availability, cost efficiency, and the ability to handle varying workloads with ease.
Adopting the blue/green technique will increase application availability, reduce deployment risk, and improve the agility and reliability of applications.
By committing to a savings plan for one-year, Kinetic + will see a 33% reduction (approx.) In its EC2 compute bill, with bills becoming much more predictable.
Conduct Frequent Reviews to Maximise the Benefits
Kinetic + has conducted numerous Well-Architected Framework Reviews with Ubertas Consulting. It is an excellent example of a business using the program strategically to achieve its objectives in the short, medium and long term – such as:
- Targeting specific pillars on existing workloads for remediation – e.g. exploring reserved instances to optimise cost.
- Ensuring new workloads launch smoothly by aligning them with all six pillars of best practice.
- Adapting architecture practices to ensure best practices are built in.
These reviews are cost-neutral to customers, making it easy to keep up with the latest best practices, identify new opportunities for improvement, and get feedback from experts.
“We were introduced to Ubertas back in 2022 and were initially sceptical of the approach of something that would be cost-neutral, and questioned how beneficial a well architected review would be. After all, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, right? I couldn’t have been more wrong!"
"The team at Ubertas are extremely knowledgeable, and following their review of our AWS account they produced a thorough document with detailed recommendations relating to security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimisation, and sustainability."
"The Ubertas team were then on hand to offer support to our team for three days whilst we implemented their recommendations in a number of key areas. To date we have done a total of three Well Architected reviews with Ubertas, and we have implemented all of their recommendations."
"We will continue to do these cost-neutral reviews periodically to ensure that we are always working to best practice guidelines. Overall, we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Ubertas.”
Why Ubertas Consulting
Ubertas Consulting is a Cloud consultancy specialising in Amazon Web Services.
As an Advanced Partner, AWS Channel Reseller (Solution Provider Program) and Well-Architected Framework Program Partner, our mission is to assist companies drive innovation and build new capabilities through embracing Cloud-native technologies and modernising with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Our consultancy services span the breadth of AWS technologies and range from advisory through to full implementation as we assist customers in applying the foundations of Well-Architected to migrate and operate their mission-critical workloads in the Cloud.
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