Polygon Education: Infrastructure Optimization

Polygon Education arises from a need for educational innovation, to accompany both teachers and students in their search for new educational experiences. Its purpose is to help train people with critical thinking and high motivation who are able to cooperate with others with greater artistic sensitivity or scientific abilities.

In short, thanks to their work in multidisciplinary teams - which include professionals in teaching, graphic design, programming or illustration, among others - from Polygon Education, they are working to give didactics a breath of fresh air.

What challenge did the company face?

Polygon Education's infrastructure required:

High level of security and availability

The company wanted to have a consulting partner that could offer them technical support and assistance with questions and possible new developments in AWS.

Solutions Provider

In addition, they were interested in the Solution Provider facility, which would allow them to offload the administrative burden of billing control.

Solution implemented

Apser offered you an initial assessment that would allow us to analyze the current status of your AWS account and, subsequently, our Sherpa support service to be able to implement the potential improvements detected during the assessment.

Based on the AWS recommended best practices For the different services involved in the client's AWS account, it is very useful to detect points of improvement in different services such as: AWS IAM, Amazon VPC, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon Route53, in addition to offering options for cost optimization and new functionalities that may be of interest to the client, such as the use of AWS CloudTrail, AWS GuardDuty, AWS Elastic BeanStalk, Amazon Cloudfront, or AWS WAF.

The solution proposed by apser revolved around two aspects:

Absorb Polygon Education's AWS account into our AWS Organization so that it would benefit from the legacy security layer (apser Atalaya): Control Tower, AWS Config, AWS SSO, SCPs, CloudTrail, GuardDuty

Carry out all the improvements analysed and detected in the initial assessment with the aim of increasing the security of the infrastructure and optimising its costs.

Listed below are some of the optimizations made by service:

AWS IAM. Named IAM users were created and passwords were strengthened to increase account access security.

Enabling AWS CloudTrail and AWS GuardDuty.

Amazon VPC. Until now, the account had a default VPC. Following AWS best practices, a network with 3 public networks and 3 private networks was created and all resources were migrated to the new VPC, to ensure correct networking sizing.

Amazon EC2. A significant amount of security work was carried out and, through Amazon CloudWatch, some elements that were not being monitored until then were monitored in order to have a better view of the use and consumption of the computing service. A new backup policy was also configured and an upgrade of t2 instances to next-generation t3 instances was carried out with the aim of improving both performance and costs.

Amazon RDS. Consumption was optimized by avoiding traffic costs associated with regional data transfers between availability zones, and some improvements were applied at both the security and configuration levels, such as extending the backup retention period to 30 days.

Amazon Route 53: DNS management has been moved internally using Amazon Route 53. This has allowed us to reduce DNS propagation times in the event of changes.

Amazon S3 + Amazon Cloudfront: We moved public static content from Amazon EBS on Amazon EC2 to a bucket on Amazon S3 and started serving it through Amazon Cloudfront. This allowed us to reduce costs and provide secure data access.

Regarding cost optimization, some proposals were presented to reduce costs based on the contracting of Saving Plans or Reserved Instances.

Results

The main benefits obtained by the client with the assessment of the infrastructure and the absorption into the apser Organization were:

Improving the performance and security of your infrastructure

Improve infrastructure availability by configuring backups on 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 in the event of any incidents

Optimize your infrastructure costs, for example by using Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3 to serve static content or by using next-generation t3 burstable instances

Increased internal knowledge of the Polygon Education team regarding its platform on AWS and the existing possibilities in terms of improving security, monitoring resources or optimizing costs, among others

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 BeanStalk for their web applications, thus decoupling persistent storage

> Use of reserved instances o saving plans, 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).