nClouds | AWS Case Studies Percussion Software

Why AWS and nClouds

Percussion Software wanted to enhance scalability and expand its customer base. Following an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR), the company needed a team of AWS DevOps professionals to support its multi-tenant SaaS CMS platform and implement infrastructure remediations based on findings of the WAFR. Percussion Software selected nClouds to provide Managed DevOps Services because of its expertise in AWS and its AWS-certified competencies in DevOps and SaaS.

Percussion Software leveraged several Amazon Web Services:

• Amazon API Gateway (API Gateway) - Makes it easy for Percussion Software’s developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.
• Amazon CloudFront (CloudFront) - A large-scale, global, and feature-rich content delivery network (CDN) that provides Percussion Software with secure, scalable, and intelligently integrated application delivery.

• Amazon CloudWatch (CloudWatch) - Monitors applications, responds to system-wide performance changes, optimizes resource utilization, and provides a unified view of operational health.
• Amazon Cognito - Lets Percussion Software add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to its web and mobile apps quickly and easily. It scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0.
• Amazon DynamoDB - A key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale.
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - A web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. It provides complete control of computing resources and runs on Amazon's proven computing environment.
• Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) - Provides Percussion Software with a simple, scalable, fully managed elastic network file system (NFS) for use with AWS services and on-premises resources.
• 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 Percussion Software’s end users to internet applications.
• Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) - A cloud-based email sending service designed to help digital marketers and application developers send marketing, notification, and transactional emails.
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) - A highly available, durable, secure, fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables Percussion Software to decouple microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) - A flexible way to store and retrieve data, providing Percussion Software with cost optimization, access control, and compliance.
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) - Enables Percussion Software to provision a logically isolated section on AWS where they can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that they define.
• AWS Application Load Balancer (AWS ALB) - To support content-based routing and applications that run in containers.
• AWS Backup - A fully managed backup service that makes it easy for Percussion Software to centralize and automate the backup of data across AWS services.
• AWS CloudFormation (CloudFormation) - Allows Percussion Software to treat its infrastructure as code, automate operations, and bring up new environments.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk - An easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, NGINX, Passenger, and IIS.
• AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) - Automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones.
• AWS Graviton2 - Amazon's second-generation processor based on Arm's 64-bit Neoverse core design and is produced using a 7-nanometer process. However, this isn't simply a rebrand or direct license of an Arm design. Graviton2 features custom silicon designed by AWS for its role in the company's cloud data centers.
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) - To control users' access to AWS services.
• AWS Lambda (Lambda) - Enables Percussion Software to run code without provisioning or managing servers. Pay only for the compute time consumed — there is no charge when code is not running.
• AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) - An open-source framework for building serverless applications. It provides shorthand syntax to express functions, APIs, databases, and event source mappings. With just a few lines per resource, you can define the application you want and model it using YAML.
• AWS Systems Manager (formerly known as SSM) - An AWS service to view and control your infrastructure on AWS.
• AWS Virtual Private Network (AWS VPN) - Enables Percussion Software to establish a secure and private encrypted tunnel from its network or device to the AWS global network.
• 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.

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

• Chef - Provides automated configuration management to enable consistent configurations at scale.
• GitHub - A development platform to host and review code, manage projects, and build software.
• HashiCorp Terraform - An infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool that allows Percussion Software to create, update, and version its AWS infrastructure.