nClouds AWS Case Study
Efabless
Accelerating Innovation: How nClouds Modernized Efabless’s IC Design Platform on AWS
“I could not be happier with nClouds. They worked hard to build a solid infrastructure on AWS that’s working as planned — we couldn’t have accomplished this without them.”
— Greg Shaurette —
SVP Information Technology, Efabless
Benefits Summary
Improved performance efficiency and scalability
Enhanced security
Optimized costs
About Efabless
Efabless, established in April 2014, is a pioneering fabless electronics company that combines crowdsourcing with open community innovation. They apply this unique concept to all aspects of analog and mixed-signal Integrated Circuit (IC) and Intellectual Property (IP) development and commercialization. Efabless serves as a marketplace, connecting a global community of skilled chip designers with customers worldwide. Their mission is to simplify smart product creation and make it accessible to everyone.
Efabless, founded in April 2014, is the world’s first fabless electronics company to combine crowdsourcing with open community innovation. It has applied that concept to all aspects of analog and mixed-signal Integrated Circuit (IC) and Intellectual Property (IP) development and commercialization. Efabless serves as a marketplace for innovators by connecting a global community of skilled chip designers with a global community of customers. Its mission is to simplify the process of smart product creation and make it available to everyone. Learn more here.
Industry
Location
San Mateo, California
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Challenge
Modernizing for Growth and Efficiency
After receiving angel funding, Efabless sought to modernize its Open Galaxy IC design platform to support anticipated business growth. The existing platform, which included a static content and marketplace application on AWS Elastic Beanstalk and an IC design platform running EDA software on Amazon EC2 Linux machines, was challenging to manage and scale. Compute-heavy tasks, such as simulation, were adversely affecting current design sessions by running directly on the machines. Efabless aimed to improve performance efficiency and scalability, enhance security, and optimize costs.
Strategy and Solution
AWS recommended nClouds, an AWS Well-Architected Partner and Premier Consulting Partner, to Efabless. nClouds conducted an AWS Well-Architected Review of Efabless’s production account, identifying opportunities for infrastructure improvement across security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and operational excellence. Efabless partnered with nClouds to address these findings.
nClouds’ featured services included the following:
DevOps Consulting Services
Providing expert guidance and implementation of DevOps practices.
Containers
Modernizing the application by containerizing it.
AWS Well-Architected Review
Ensuring the infrastructure adheres to AWS best practices.
Cost Optimization
Implementing strategies to reduce cloud spending.
Application / Infrastructure Modernization
Architecting and implementing a modern, cloud-native infrastructure on AWS.
Security Management
Enhancing the overall security posture.
nClouds implemented Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using CloudFormation and refined an existing proof of concept into a production-ready solution, building out the AWS infrastructure and automation based on best practices. They also set up CloudWatch monitoring and managed the non-production and production infrastructure buildout and deployment. For offline processing, nClouds designed and validated the solution, modified CloudFormation templates, and set up additional CloudWatch monitoring.
Results + Benefits
Enhanced Performance, Security, and Cost Efficiency
The collaboration between nClouds and Efabless resulted in a modernized IC design platform with numerous benefits:
Improved performance efficiency and scalability
By implementing CloudWatch and Datadog for monitoring, leveraging AWS Global Accelerator for global performance, and architecting with Amazon VPC across two AWS AZs for high availability, Efabless achieved enhanced performance and scalability. Amazon ECS provides high performance and scalability, while AWS Auto Scaling adjusts capacity to maintain predictable performance. AWS CodeCommit offers a secure and scalable environment for collaboration.
Enhanced security
nClouds replaced HAProxy with Kong to eliminate public IPs and securely manage communication via API. OpenVPN eliminated direct public internet connections to Amazon EC2, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) was enforced. IAM roles provide dynamic credentials for AWS service access. AWS Systems Manager was implemented for configuration management and security operations like patching. Amazon EventBridge helps automate responses to security events, and NAT gateway prevents external connections to private subnet instances.
Optimized costs
IAM policies were assigned to IAM roles to minimize the creation of unnecessary resources and control resource creation and management. AWS Systems Manager provides a detailed inventory for entity lifecycle tracking, and CloudWatch data enables rightsizing decisions for compute resources. AWS Auto Scaling, along with AWS Lambda and Amazon SQS, contributes to cost efficiency by automatically identifying and removing unused resources, performing rightsizing operations, and scaling performance and cost with usage.
Building a Robust Future with nClouds and AWS
The successful modernization of Efabless’s IC design platform showcases the profound impact of a strategic partnership with nClouds. By leveraging nClouds’ deep AWS and DevOps expertise, Efabless transformed its infrastructure, achieving significant improvements in performance, security, and cost efficiency. This collaboration not only addressed their immediate needs for scalability and modernization but also established a robust and resilient cloud environment that will support Efabless’s continued innovation and growth in the dynamic semiconductor industry.
