Fond (fond.co) is a SaaS platform that seamlessly consolidates employee rewards and recognition processes into one easy-to-use solution. With Fond, employees and managers can recognize each other, redeem rewards, access exclusive corporate discounts, and measure success, so HR departments spend less time managing programs and more time driving results.
Rewards and Recognition, Corporate Discounts, Human Resources
San Francisco, California Portland, Oregon
Fond needed an optimized, automated cloud infrastructure to improve app usability, reliability, resilience, and security.
AWS Well-Architected Review, containerization, infrastructure automation (AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Application Load Balancer), nOps cloud management
Streamlined delivery pipeline
Process improvement to improve usability and security
Enhanced infrastructure resilience and reliability
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.
Just as Fond helps forward-thinking companies implement and manage rewards and recognition programs, nClouds engaged with Fond as an extension of our team to attain our shared goals. Our first priority was establishing a well-architected infrastructure on AWS to increase delivery speed and improve usability.”
VP of Engineering, Fond
Fond needed more automation for their cloud infrastructure. They wanted to use containerization to improve scalability, simplify, and enhance deployment speed and efficiency. Fond needed a repeatable, reliable, and improved process to streamline their delivery pipeline and enhance usability. They also wanted to easily bring up new environments, such as launching new Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions when needed, or adjusting capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance.
An AWS account manager asked nClouds, an AWS Well-Architected Partner and Premier Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network, to propose an AWS Well-Architected Review for Fond. The objective was to compare their architecture to industry best practices to help Fond get the most from their AWS environment.
An AWS Well-Architected Review uses the AWS Well-Architected Framework to provide a consistent approach to evaluate and remediate systems, based on best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-optimized, and operationally excellent systems for the cloud.
During the Review, nClouds worked with a cross-section of Fond’s internal stakeholders to perform a deep-dive on a critical workload and audit their operations for compliance with the five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. nClouds augmented the deep-dive with nOps, a SaaS cloud management tool that provides comprehensive, automated discovery and continuous compliance insights for AWS environments, aligned directly with the AWS Well-Architected Framework for cost, security, compliance, and more.
Following the Review, nClouds made recommendations based on the business implications of their workload design decisions and provided Fond with a prioritized roadmap of short-, medium-, and long-term goals.
“The (AWS Well-Architected) Review led by nClouds was a valuable process that gave us actionable benchmarks across our infrastructure. From that, we created an action plan. nClouds immediately implemented containerization to improve app scalability and reliability, an essential step forward in supporting our rapid growth.”
- Shirley A. Foster, VP of Engineering, Fond
The AWS Well-Architected Review that nClouds performed with Fond identified areas for enhancement in their operational excellence, reliability, and security pillars. Fond initially considered executing the remediations themselves, but the AWS account manager recommended that they engage nClouds to accelerate the container journey and build the future infrastructure. Fond agreed to move forward, having nClouds implement the recommendations while they focused on managing their current infrastructure.
To start, an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) was provisioned in a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud. AWS resources are launched in a virtual network, providing Fond with complete control over their virtual networking environment including the selection of their IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. The Amazon VPC is composed of a public subnet and a private subnet. Each subnet has AWS Application Load Balancer integrated with Amazon ECS to support content-based routing and applications that run in containers. Six Oracle MySQL databases and three Redis open source in-memory data structure stores reside in the private subnet.
In support of the operational excellence pillar of the Well-Architected Framework, nClouds implemented AWS CloudFormation to automate operations and bring up new environments, and AWS Fargate to help reduce the operational overhead involved in managing Amazon ECS clusters.
The reliability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework requires a well-planned foundation with monitoring in place and scalability to handle changes in demand or requirements. nClouds worked with Fond to improve the scalability of their architecture by including several services: AWS Auto Scaling groups (to automatically adjust capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost), Amazon CloudWatch (to monitor and respond to system-wide performance changes), and Amazon ECS (to run and scale containerized applications on AWS).
The security pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework relies on an architecture that protects data and systems, controls access, and responds automatically to security events. The new architecture includes AWS Secrets Manager (to protect secrets needed to access Fond’s applications, services, and IT resources), AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store (for secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets management), and AWS KMS (a managed service that makes it easy for Fond to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt their data). AWS IAM was implemented to control users' access to AWS services. AWS Certificate Manager secures network communications and establishes the identity of websites over the Internet as well as resources on private networks.
The new architecture is containerized for more flexible development and faster delivery of new features. There is a Docker Hub account for container image discovery, distribution and change management, user and team collaboration, and workflow automation throughout the development pipeline. Within the Hub account, CircleCI continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform is integrated with the GitHub development platform. With an automated testing and build process, Fond can now rapidly build and release quality software at scale..
Interested in an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review? Schedule a free AWS Well-Architected Assessment with nClouds to see how you can apply architectural best practices to drive better business outcomes.
Teaming with nClouds, Fond moved to an optimized, automated cloud infrastructure on AWS cloud. The project has yielded numerous benefits:
With a containerized and automated infrastructure, Fond now has a streamlined continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline that enables more flexible development and faster delivery of new features.
A core tenet of CI/CD is the application of automation to streamline processes. Automating infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, continuous code delivery, and container management has improved usability. The automated processes have delivered improved security by protecting data and systems, controlling access, reducing human error, and enabling automated response to security events.
With monitoring in place to automatically respond to system-wide performance changes, and improved scalability to handle changes in demand or requirements, Fonds’ new architecture has enhanced resilience and reliability.
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