Cerebriti Success Story

Cerebriti: Increase in Security

Cerebriti.com is the The most important portal for educational and knowledge games in SpanishOne of the strengths of this portal is that the games are created by the users themselves, who do not need any technical knowledge to do so. This is why it is an invaluable tool for teachers interested in gamifying their lessons.

Thanks to Cerebriti, thousands of games on all kinds of subjects are made available to the general public through different educational solutions: cerebriti.com, Cerebriti EDU y Academons Elementary.

What challenge did the company face?

Traditional hosting

Cerebriti's infrastructure was hosted on a traditional low-cost hosting service. The provider was not offering them good quality technical support and, in addition, they were not receiving a quick response to incidents such as sporadic temporary blockages, so the Cerebriti team began to evaluate possible alternatives that met the quality standards they needed.

Migrating to AWS

After analyzing the different options, Cerebriti decided to migrate its web applications to Amazon Web Services, where they were certain that they would be in a secure and decoupled environment that would also allow them to increase visibility of what was happening at all times in their systems and have professional and top-quality technical support.

It was at that point that Cerebriti decided to have an AWS partner specialized in migrations that would offer them support and accompaniment in the process of migration of its 30 sites to the new platform, thus ensuring a smooth transition to the new provider.

Solution implemented

Initially, the apser team planned to use the CloudEndure tool to perform the “Lif&Shift” migration of the client sites, but after thoroughly analyzing the infrastructure, it was detected that in some cases a deprecated PHP version was being used, so it was preferable to use the CloudEndure tool. deploy a completely new infrastructure and start to perform the migration on it site by siteThis was done, checking the correct operation first, and then moving each site into production separately.

To manage the sites in a comfortable and easy way, it was decided to use an instance Amazon EC2 with Plesk installed. In turn, in order to be able to analyze the temporary blockages, the client was offered the possibility of decoupling its main applications (Academons and Cerebriti EDU) from its databases, making use of Amazon RDS and its functionality Performance Insights.

In parallel, a manual migration of the various domain records (academons.com, cerebriti.com, eurotrivial.eu and thegrowthery.org) was carried out to Amazon Route53, in order to be able to manage the DNS of said domains from the AWS platform itself.

In summary, apser carried out the complete migration of its infrastructure. Some of the main tasks performed were:

Complete migration of your monolithic infrastructure to AWS

Decoupling app and database

Using Amazon RDS Performance Insights to Visualize Intensive Database Usage

Migrating corporate websites to a Plesk server hosted by AWS

Managing DNS for Customer Domains from Amazon Route53

Monitoring resources

Finally, the necessary alerts were configured to allow good monitoring of the service with Amazon Cloud Watch which, in conjunction with the use of AWS Compute Optimizer, allows you to always have Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS resources optimized.

Results

Once the deployment was completed, the client could continue using the platform with which they had been working for more than 15 years, maintaining the history of their data, in a maximum security environment, and with a 20% cost savings thanks to the server automatically shutting down at night.

Improving the performance and security of your infrastructure

Improve infrastructure availability by configuring backups of Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances

Greater control of your infrastructure thanks to resource monitoring and alarm configuration

Increased visibility into potential bottlenecks (e.g. in the database)

Quality technical support to be covered against possible incidents

Optimizing the costs of your infrastructure, achieving, for example, cost reduction during holiday periods

Continuous advice from apser as an AWS Advanced Partner for technical or cost optimization questions

Next steps

Some of the next steps proposed to the client are:

> Implementation of AWS WAF with the aim of adding an extra layer of security to your infrastructure and improving your protection against the most common web attacks.

> Implementation of Amazon CloudFront to cache content and reduce latency in content delivery

> Use of reserved instances, with a commitment of one or three years, to significantly reduce infrastructure costs

> Use of Amazon RDS MultiAZ as a way to improve platform availability

> Use of Amazon SE for sending emails from your applications

Why Apser

apser is the AWS Advanced Consulting Partner specialized in private companies, public sector, ISVs and non-profit organizations.

The apser team provides a customized, agile and understandable approach that contributes to the widespread adoption of the cloud paradigm.

In 2018 we began our experience with AWS and, since then, we have not stopped incorporating knowledge and experience, a fact that drives us to improve the efficiency of our clients' platforms.

Our team operates through two business units: Cloud Solutions (as a managed services provider) and Cloud Professional Services (as consultants).