nClouds AWS Case Study
Alation
Unlocking Data Intelligence: How nClouds Modernized Alation’s Application on AWS for Enhanced Reliability and Innovation
“I value nClouds’ expertise in maintaining and troubleshooting the production environment for our internal team and our end customers.”
— Abhishek Gupta —
Site Reliability Engineering Manager, Alation
Benefits Summary
Engineers can devote more time to product innovation.
Enhanced support of application layer for end customers.
Expert modernization of its application infrastructure.
About Alation
Alation is the leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions and an AWS Advanced Technology Partner. Its platform combines machine learning with human insight to address the most demanding challenges in data and metadata management. Alation provides a single, trusted source where data users, regardless of technical skill set, can find, understand, and trust the data they need to make informed business decisions. The company empowers organizations worldwide to build and foster a robust data culture.
Industry
Location
Redwood City, CA
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Challenge
Modernizing for Uptime and Reliability on AWS
Alation aimed to modernize its application and ensure the continuous uptime and reliability of its production environment on AWS. It sought to migrate its application from Amazon EC2 to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) while enhancing its monitoring capabilities to maintain a consistent experience for end customers.
Why AWS and nClouds?
Alation has a long history with nClouds and AWS, which first involved migrating Alation from on-premises to AWS. Then, nClouds completed the next phase of modernization of Alation’s platform from a monolithic infrastructure to a modern, containerized environment. Next, Alation needed an enhanced platform to maintain its production environment.
To support its growing business, Alation asked nClouds to manage site reliability and provide 24/7 support services for its end customers in a multitenant AWS environment. Among other capabilities, it needed scalability. So, Alation’s in-house DevOps team designed the architecture, and nClouds’ site reliability engineering team implemented its plan.
Strategy and Solution
Expert Application Modernization and Proactive SRE by nClouds
nClouds, a certified AWS and DevOps consulting provider, partnered with Alation to achieve its modernization goals, leveraging its site reliability engineering (SRE) team’s expertise. nClouds implemented a comprehensive solution to enhance Alation’s application infrastructure:
- Enhanced Observability and Monitoring
- AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store:
Used to store sensitive application configuration data and secrets, enhancing security and operational efficiency. - AWS CloudWatch:
Set up to collect logs and metrics from the AWS environment, providing deep insights into system performance and health. - Datadog Integration:
Public dashboards were created on Datadog for Alation’s end customers, allowing them to visually track their AWS resource consumption, service failures, and HTTP requests. A separate dashboard for Alation’s internal team provides an overview of resource status and infrastructure details for all customers. - Service-Level Objectives (SLOs):
nClouds helped Alation create monitor-based SLOs, providing a clear framework for defining performance targets to ensure a consistent experience for end customers.
- AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store:
- Migration to Amazon EKS:
Alation’s application was migrated from Amazon EC2 to a modernized Amazon EKS-based architecture. Amazon EKS is a fully managed service that supports application modernization by automating microservices deployment, management, availability, and scalability. This transition enables Alation to innovate faster, reduce risk, accelerate time to market, and lower its total cost of ownership. - 24/7 Proactive Support:
nClouds provides 24/7 proactive support for Alation’s production environment, ensuring continuous uptime and reliability.
Results + Benefits
Accelerated Innovation, Superior Support, and Optimized Operations
The collaboration between nClouds and Alation delivered significant and tangible benefits:
Engineers Devote More Time to Product Innovation
By offloading infrastructure management and monitoring to nClouds, Alation’s engineers are now free to focus on core product development and innovation.
Enhanced Support of Application Layer for End Customers
Through improved monitoring, SLOs, and public dashboards, Alation can provide a superior and more transparent support experience for its customers.
Expert Modernization of Application Infrastructure and Operations
The successful migration to Amazon EKS has provided Alation with a modern, scalable, and efficient application infrastructure. This leads to faster innovation, reduced risk, accelerated time to market, and a lower total cost of ownership.
Maintained Uptime and Reliability
The comprehensive SRE practices and 24/7 support ensure the continuous uptime and reliability of Alation’s production environment.