Genially is an online tool for creating interactive content aimed at a wide range of audiences, from corporations and media to educational institutions and designers. In early 2020, she won the Global Edtech Startups Awards (GESA) for Best Startup of the Future at an event in London attended by around 2,500 companies from around the world.
It currently has a community of more than 5 million users in all countries of the world. Its client portfolio includes companies such as Telefónica, Santillana, Porsche, Danone and Michelin.
Genially:
Infrastructure resizing in AWS
What challenge was the company facing?
Genially warned some points of improvement that they had been dragging along and that were now starting to turn into potential problems. Among the most worrying points for them were:
- having an oversized architecture that they wanted to adjust to optimize its costs.
- the proper use of the autoscaling functionality that would allow them to increase or decrease resources automatically based on the needs of the application
Implemented solution
As part of our AWS Onboarding Program 4 Startups by apser solution, we audit the entire deployed infrastructure, addressing it according to the different services involved:
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- AWS S3
- Route 53
- Amazon Aurora
- Amazon CloudWatch
- And more!
During the audit process, potential improvements were identified in each of the services, as well as recommendations to be implemented following the best practices of the AWS WAF (Well-Architected Framework).
On the other hand, certain architecture security issues were reflected in a document that would serve as a guide for the implementation of all identified improvements.
Results
We are currently still working with Genially on the assessment phase of our SHERPA accompaniment programme. However, significant improvements have been made to the configuration of the AWS services that are the core of the Genially tool: AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS S3.
AWS Beanstalk uses different environments to manage all requests received by users. The different environments, mounted on a monolithic infrastructure to use with dozens of servers running, even having an Autoscaling Group, were not working properly, a fact that led to the implementation of some improvements:
- AutoScaling Groups were configured based on CPU usage and/or latency
- Helped to configure environments for associated load balancers to detect and destroy unhealthy machines
- Improved configuration of deployments, both code and resource, to avoid downtimes in deployments and thus prevent end users from being affected.
- A recurring error in the use of t2 instances and their associated burst balance was detected and fixed.
As for AWS S3, the most significant work was to improve the security policies associated with buckets (bucket policies) to make them more restrictive.
Next steps
Once modifications have been made to the configuration of the various AWS services with the aim of improving the performance and functioning of the infrastructure, as well as eliminating the security vulnerabilities detected, the improvements identified during the assessment phase will be implemented using the best practices of the services involved.
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 our AWS Validated Qualifications here.
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