Caso de Éxito Cerebriti

Cerebriti.com is the most important portal for educative games and Spanish knowledge. One of its strong points is that the games are created by their own users, who, in addition, don't need to have any technical expertise to do so. For all that, Cerebriti is a priceless worthwhile weapon for teachers interested in gamifying their lessons.

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

Cerebriti:

Security increase

What challenge was Edtech facing?

The infrastructure of Cerebriti was placed in a traditional low-cost hosting. The provider was not offering them good quality technical support and, in addition, in the face of incidents such as sporadic temporary blockages, they were not being given a quick response, so the Cerebriti team began to evaluate possible alternatives that would meet the quality standards they needed.

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 uncoupled environment that would also allow them to increase the visibility of what was happening at all times on their systems and to have professional and top-quality technical support.

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

Implemented solution

Initially, the apser team planned to use CloudEndure to do the “Lif&Shift” migration of client sites, but after a thorough analysis of the infrastructure, it was found that in some cases a deprecated PHP version was being used, so it was preferable to deploy a completely new infrastructure and start migrating on it site to site. This was done, checking the correct functioning first, and then moving on to production each site separately.

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

At the same time, a manual migration of the different registers of their domains (academons.com, cerebriti.com, eurotrivial.eu and thegrowthery.org) to Amazon Route53 was carried out in order to manage the DNS of these domains from the AWS platform itself.

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

Full migration of your monolithic infrastructure to AWS
Decoupling app and database
Using Amazon RDS Performance Insights to visualize the intensive use of BBDD
Migration of corporate websites to a Plesk server hosted by AWS
DNS management of client domains from Amazon Route53
Monitoring of resources

Finally, the necessary alerts were configured to allow a good monitoring of the service with Amazon CloudWatch which, in conjunction with the use of AWS Compute Optimizer, allows to always optimize the resources of Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS.

Results

The main benefits for the client from migrating to AWS were:

Improving the performance and security of your infrastructure
Improved infrastructure availability by configuring backups of Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances
Greater control of your infrastructure through resource monitoring and alarm configuration
Increased visibility in potential bottlenecks (e.g. in the database)
Quality technical support to be covered in the event of possible incidents
Cost optimisation of your infrastructure, e.g. reducing costs during holiday periods
Continuous advice of apser as Advanced partner of AWS before technical or cost optimization questions

Next Steps

Some of the following steps proposed to the client are:

Implementation of AWS WAF to add a layer of security to your infrastructure and improve your protection against the most common web attacks
Implementation of Amazon CloudFront to reduce latency in content delivery
Use of reserved instances, with a one- or three-year commitment, to significantly reduce infrastructure costs
Using Amazon RDS MultiAZ as a way to improve platform availability
Using Amazon SES to send emails from your apps

Why apser

apser is the AWS Advanced Consulting Partner specializing in companies, public administrations, startups and non-profit.

The apser team provides a customized, easy-to-understand and agile approach with the goal of contributing to the widespread adoption of the cloud paradigm.

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

In 2018 we had our first experience with AWS. Since then, we have not stopped incorporating knowledge and experience that, day by day, help us improve the effectiveness of our clients’ platforms. You can consult here our AWS Validated Qualifications.