nClouds | AWS Case Studies Alation

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 multi-tenant AWS environment. Among other capabilities, they needed scalability. So, Alation’s in-house DevOps team designed the architecture and nClouds’ Site Reliability Engineering team implemented their plan.

Alation leveraged several Amazon Web Services:

• Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) - A fully-managed Docker container registry integrated with Amazon ECS that makes it easy for Alation to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images.
• Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) - Makes it easy for Alation to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications using Kubernetes on AWS across multiple AWS Availability Zones to eliminate a single point of failure.
• Amazon Redshift - Enables Alation to analyze all its business data using existing business intelligence tools.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) - This makes it easy for Alation to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.

• Amazon Route 53 - A highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service that provides a reliable and cost-effective way to route Alation’s end users to internet applications.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) - A flexible way to store and retrieve data, providing Alation with cost optimization, access control, and compliance.
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) - Enables Alation to provision a logically isolated section on AWS where they can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that they define.
• AWS Network Load Balancer - Handles tens of millions of requests per second while maintaining high throughput at ultra-low latency, with no effort on Alation’s part.
• AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) - Helps protect web applications or APIs against common web exploits that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.

Alation’s solution stack also included additional, essential third-party tools:

• Datadog - A monitoring and analytics tool to determine performance metrics and event monitoring for infrastructure and cloud services. The software can monitor services such as servers, databases, and tools.
• GitHub - A development platform to host and review code, manage projects, and build software.
• Jenkins - An open-source automation server written in Java to support CI/CD.
• PagerDuty - A SaaS platform that enables Alation to prevent and resolve business-impacting incidents to improve customer experience.
• SendGrid - A cloud-based SMTP provider that allows users to send email without having to maintain email servers. SendGrid manages all of the technical details, from scaling the infrastructure to ISP outreach and reputation monitoring to whitelist services and real-time analytics.
• Sumo Logic - Provides cloud monitoring, log management, cloud SIEM tools, and real-time insights for web and SaaS-based apps. The app consists of predefined dashboards that enable Alation to track performance, logins, connections, errors, and overall system health.
• HashiCorp Vault - Provides Alation with secure access to tokens, passwords, certificates, and encryption keys for protecting secrets and other sensitive data using a UI, CLI, or HTTP API.