Appify’s no-code plug-and-play platform is for business process and IT stakeholders at field service businesses. Users can rapidly create field service apps in a safe and IT-compliant environment with a ready-to-use solution library.
The platform provides highly configurable modules to enable every aspect of the field service experience: calendars, maps, inventory, work orders, time cards, parts & returns, asset tracking, checklists, dynamic workflows, on-my-way, and much more. To learn more, go to https://appify.com/
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-prem field service software
Campbell, CA
Improve performance efficiency, elasticity, scalability, the speed of communications between microservices, and cost optimization.
DevOps Services – Infrastructure Build-Out and Automation, Containers, Microservices
Improved performance efficiency, elasticity, and scalability
Faster communication between microservices
Reduced costs
Want to achieve benefits like these? Schedule a free Application Modernization Assessment with nClouds to learn how to build sustainable systems for delivering better software faster.
Moving from ECS to EKS and VPC deployment is a major milestone for Appify. It's enhanced the scalability and high-availability required for our SaaS solution. The nClouds team came in at the right time and helped us achieve our goals. We appreciate all the great work that went into this project.”
Platform Architect, Appify
Appify wanted to migrate their existing compute workload on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS). They wanted a uniform Kubernetes-based platform to enhance their ability to distribute and scale their field service software solution, improve the speed of communication between microservices, and save costs.
Appify asked nClouds to help them create a new Amazon EKS platform for their application stack. The project included adding Amazon CloudWatch monitoring to the workload, and using HashiCorp Terraform to capture the configuration of the new infrastructure as code.
nClouds, a Premier Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN), applied its expertise in building and managing infrastructure modernization projects. nClouds helped Appify build out their application cloud and operations cloud core infrastructure for a new Amazon EKS platform.
Appify engaged with nClouds to help them migrate their application stack from Amazon ECS to Amazon EKS, and to create an Amazon VPC. Amazon VPC provides advanced security features, such as security groups and network access control lists, to enable inbound and outbound filtering at the instance and subnet level.
Appify’s cloud infrastructure was comprised of an application cloud and an operations cloud. The application cloud was a single-tenant setup with 12 services (four admin, one client, seven web modules) running on an Amazon ECS cluster, with data stored in Amazon RDS. The setup was replicated for nine clients. The operations cloud was running three common services on a single Amazon ECS cluster.
nClouds began by reviewing containers and fixing any gaps in configuration in both the application and operations clouds. Next, Terraform core infrastructure buildout was performed for Amazon EKS, and AWS services were migrated to Amazon EKS platform version eks.1.14 in both clouds.
nClouds implemented Amazon CloudWatch for Amazon EKS container monitoring of all services, to ensure adequate performance for all tenants of the system. Amazon CloudWatch’s automated dashboards summarize the performance and health of Appify’s Amazon EKS and Kubernetes clusters by pod, node, namespace, task, container, and service. The dashboards reveal insights on key metrics such as CPU utilization, memory utilization over pod limits, container restarts, pod network insights, etc.
The new infrastructure includes AWS App Mesh in each private subnet for Appify’s applications running on Amazon EKS. AWS App Mesh supports services that use service discovery naming for their components. Its application-level networking improves the speed of communication between microservices that are mesh-enabled and provides end-to-end visibility.
There are three private subnets in the Amazon VPC — one in Availability Zone A and the other two in Availability Zones B and C. AWS Auto Scaling groups are used to spawn Amazon EC2 instances in these zones automatically depending on the services and resources needed for them. The pods running the application stack connect to the Amazon RDS database.
The Amazon VPC connects to the Internet through an attached Internet gateway. A network address translation (NAT) gateway enables instances in the private subnets to connect to the Internet or other AWS services, but prevents the Internet from initiating a connection with those instances. Application Load Balancers distribute incoming application traffic to the respective pod in the Availability Zones via App Mesh proxy, to increase the availability of Appify’s applications.
Teaming with nClouds, Appify now has a uniform Kubernetes-based platform for their application stack. The project has yielded numerous benefits:
Amazon EKS automatically manages scalable and high-availability control plane nodes that run across multiple availability zones, eliminating a single point of failure. Kubernetes control plane nodes perform tasks such as starting and stopping containers and storing cluster data.
AWS App Mesh enables Appify to have more flexible, more reliable, and faster communication between microservices.
AWS App Mesh not only provides flexible, reliable, and faster communication between microservices, it also helps to reduce cost by avoiding unnecessary AWS ALBs that were previously used for inter-service communication in ECS. And, cost savings are also achieved in the new infrastructure by having shared resources for Dev and Staging residing in the same Kubernetes cluster, plus a shared database server and shared network resources.
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