Published: Jun 15, 2020
NCS helps client accelerates application rollouts with AWS services
A NCS client in the tourism industry had challenges in creating new environments in their infrastructure for application team. This led to long turnaround time to create business value as application had to install hardware and provision necessary software. Customer needed a fast way to manage the infrastructure by auto provisioning its server farm and use technology to manage the application build using CI/CD DevSecOps to ensure that secured applications are developed.
Creating business value using technology and delivering it quickly to business advantage is a continuous challenge. Hosting applications securely, rapidly setting up the environment and using shift left technology to develop secure applications are some of the technologies an organisation needs to adopt to rise to the challenge of creating business value.
NCS helps client develop and deploy a scalable and secure development and hosting environment with AWS
To address this, NCS helped the client develop a platform using Amazon Web Services (AWS) which will enable it to embark on agile and secure development. The solution taps on AWS’s infrastructure and platform services to create a virtual private cloud. This provides scalable and secure development and hosting environment to rapidly develop and deploy applications using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
The platform includes commercial off-the-shelf tools as well as AWS services that work hand in hand to enable the feedback cycle required for CI/CD. For example, Ansible and Terraform is used to support the multi-cloud implementation. Integration was done with tools like Jira to provision resources on AWS such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and Amazon Relational Data Services (RDS) in an orderly and predictable fashion while AWS CloudWatch enables development teams to collect and access all the performance and operational data in form of logs and metrics from a single platform.
Accelerating application rollouts
One of the main benefits in using AWS Services is that client does not have to build and any own hosting infrastructure, but can build and deploy its applications in the cloud environment on a pay-per-use basis.
The resources can be scaled on demand, taking away the guesswork surrounding capacity planning. This delivers significant savings as the agency no longer has to procure more resources upfront to cater to projected growth in demand, but instead subscribe to the resources as and when they are needed.
New application environments can be spun up quickly – from 30 minutes up to a maximum of 4 hours, compared with the traditional procurement and provisioning process which could take 4 to 8 weeks after a resource request has been approved.
By providing development teams with access to cloud-native tools, AWS Services eliminates the need for them to devote manpower resources to maintaining these capabilities. At the same time, shift left practices ensure that tests are carried out early in the development cycle to ensure the delivery of quality code.
With AWS, NCS is able to help client deploy a scalable and cost-effective environment for hosting existing projects and at the same time allow development work on new services to start immediately after they are approved. This has delivered compelling savings on different fronts – in terms of time, effort and costs – and at the same time enabled projects to be delivered with improved quality, boosting confidence in the deliverables of every project.