Curve Royalty Systems
“Working with Ubertas was great for us to improve our setup and prepare us better for scaling the business. Since generating our new setup, our development processes have become much more structured, and the app is scaling well with the business demands. Ubertas took the time to understand our business and its requirements, and came up with the most appropriate upgrades for us at the time. This has set us up for continued growth within AWS in the future.”
Tom Allen, Technology Director at Curve Royalty Systems
About Curve Royalty
Established in January 2019, Curve Royalty Systems was launched by former ADA/Warner, Cooking Vinyl and Essential Music executives, Richard Leach (General Manager), Ray Bush (Finance Director) and Tom Allen (Technology Director).
Its royalty processing platform was built to deal with the scale and demands of music businesses in the digital age. A royalty system purpose-built for today’s music industry.
Challenge
Various aspects of Curve’s existing architecture didn’t conform to AWS best architectural practices and a few of their applications were still monoliths running on EC2.
Ubertas discovered that multi-AZ was not being utilised and the applications had single point of failure. Multi-AZ is vital to enhance durability, increase availability and protection of your database performance.
The Staging and Production environments were running in a single account. We would advise to create a multi-account structure, as this offers flexible security controls and easily adapts to business processes.
Resource creation was all carried out using the AWS Console and there was no automation or IAC in use. Utilising CloudFormation will make the process faster and easily repeatable in the future.
Approach
Ubertas Consulting first began the engagement with Curve Royalty Systems by performing 3 Well-Architected Framework Reviews for each of their workloads, these included – Foundations, Ingest and Calculate.
The Well-Architected framework, published and maintained by AWS, offers practical guidance around the 5 pillars, Cost Optimisation, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency and Operational Excellence; and Ubertas Consulting, as a member of the Well-Architected Framework Program, we were able to ensure that each workload aligned to AWS best practice.
Curve Royalty Systems had a monolithic application running on EC2 and ECS-EC2 instances and were interested in improving the scalability and speed of their platform – this is when we began to look at rearchitecting their infrastructure and taking advantage of the AWS-managed service, Fargate.
Architecture
Benefits
Through a structured process of applying the principles of the Well-Architected Framework, Curve Royalty Systems is now well placed to operate at scale and continue to innovate and evolve their solutions on AWS.
The immediate benefits of working with Ubertas Consulting has been to align to AWS best practice and migrate towards the AWS managed service Fargate to ensure the consistent quality and speed of software deployments, whilst allowing scalability and continuing to benefit from Amazon’s rapid pace of development.
These improvements have largely been realised through the effective use of multi-account setup, containerisation, Infrastructure as code (CloudFormation) and Multi-AZ deployments.
Ubertas have assisted Curve to setup Cross Account Pipelines using CloudFormation, these include a shared services account that contains all the code pipelines, and the same pipelines deploy to multiple accounts such as, Dev, Staging and Production.
Building a secure Cross-Account Continuous Delivery Pipeline helps Curve create multiple AWS accounts as they provide the highest level of resource and security isolation.
Curve can now produce new environments to test infrastructure upgrades to validate changes, without impacting production. Having infrastructure in CloudFormation will help Curve to reduce single points of failure against loss and will help reduce human error by creating predictable results.
AWS Well-Architected Partner Program
When designing and building cloud platforms on AWS customers can benefit from the best practices driven from thousands of deployments across and embodied in the Well-Architected Framework. Aligning to Well-Architected often starts with a review and Ubertas Consulting provides this service to customers at zero charge as our commitment to the program.
About 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 customers utilise the AWS Cloud in a way that aligns to best practice.
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 the Well-Architected Framework to migrate and operate their mission critical workloads in the Cloud.
To find out more about Ubertas Consulting and take your next steps to being Well-Architected, get in touch via the form below. We’d love to help.