Reducing Costs and Increasing Resiliency for ABG Rateshop 

Partner Solution

D3Clarity performed an 8-step process in collaboration with ABG’s architecture team and the executive business sponsor, specifically:

• Defined a mission/charter for the project.
• Defined a tangible set of current state problems to be solved or improved.
• Defined success metric linked to tangible business value gained from these improvements. These included hard cost savings as well as softer efficiency and improved compliance-related gains.
• Estimated future state costs in terms of migration and on-going AWS and prod ops support costs.
• Completed an A-to-Z pilot to prove viability of the future state solution and to generate real costs used to future validate our AWS cost assumptions.
• Execution of a phased implementation plan with deliverables linked directly to our defined success metrics.
• Process definition, training, staff enablement and ongoing operation support to assist the client in owning production ops of the future state solution.
• Establishment of a repeatable process to be reused for future migration projects.

This project included modernization and was not a direct lift and shift. In our current state analysis we captured the following:

• Current state infrastructure solution architecture, including networking, security protections, servers/VM config (proc, RAM, type, OS) as well as storage (by type).
• We also captured business-level performance requirements and areas business users felt they would benefit from performance and availability related enhancements.
• Our solution design was based on exceeding these “business defined” performance requirements vs a classic app performance technical requirements.
• Real-world performance was testing at multiple stages as we continued to right-size the solution components for the right mix of cost and performance.
• The ultimate test was direct feedback from the support team (business users) via multiple feedback surveys and working sessions.

D3Clarity paid particular focus on the business requirements of the end users to determine what kind of infrastructure was to be deployed following best practices (especially following cloud security protocols of least-privilege, IAM etc.). D3Clarity sized the infrastructure of the cloud such that it serves the application needs for the next 2 years, provisioned the infrastructure and network bandwidth to meet the end-to-end response time within the current SLA and the response time within the cloud to be under 200ms.

The architecture was designed to make sure the application and databases are highly available and horizontally scalable to accommodate the future volume growth. D3Clarity also employed a CI/CD DevOps pipeline to enable faster release cycles for the enhancements and bug fixes to the application.

Security is of paramount importance to us and especially this client, so we saw that any communication across the wire would be encrypted with TLS1.2 handshake while also adhering to PCI DESS secure communication guidelines. Data at rest would be encrypted and free of PCI information, also adhering to PCI DESS data privacy guidelines. All PII data on cloud would be compliant to the GDPR guidelines and we ensured that the application is ported onto the cloud platform without any changes to its functionality.

Furthermore, ECS architecture was set up to be multi-AZ between the us-east-1 and eu-west-1 regions. If a server or AZ becomes unhealthy, the containers would be deployed to the other AZ until it is healthy. Failover decisions are made from the CI/CD pipeline and triggered based on CloudWatch events.