AWS Modernization

Assessing current costs and understanding your operational economics is critical to knowing which modernizations to start when. While modernizing as early as possible is often best, our teams will help you understand not just the benefits but also the ways in which your cost structure changes with your architecture, consulting with you to decide what’s best for your AWS environment and business aims.

If you find yourself running into trouble with updating your codebases, deploying your applications, outages, or downtime, you might be operating in a way that’s no longer appropriate for your scale or architecture. Implementing containers and a well-designed CI/CD pipeline are two modernizations critical to every business’s agility and often necessary for any architecture beyond a certain size.

One of the most difficult parts of growing a business on the cloud is the sheer scale and complexity that success brings, especially for issues like compliance. Modernization techniques help you design your infrastructure in such a way that you have consistent, reproducible configurations of your resources, secure access controls for your organization and users, clear logs of evidence for all audits, and immediate notification when an incident occurs. Designing systems that combine these features without becoming overwhelming or disruptive for your operations is one of our specialties.

Certainly! Here’s a few to consider: Utilize multiple Availability Zones for failover and redundancy and use Elastic Load Balancing to distribute incoming traffic across instances. Take advantage of Amazon S3 versioning to protect against unintentional data deletions. Where possible, leverage Autoscaling Groups to handle unexpected traffic spikes. Set up AWS CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray for monitoring and anomaly detection. You may also need to containerize if you have RTO or RPO targets you intend to meet, and you should regularly review and update your Disaster Recovery (DR) plan.

To ease your transition, start small and experiment with non-critical tasks or new, isolated features. If you’re starting with AWS Lambda, get a feel for working with the associated services and technologies, like Amazon API Gateway, Amazon ECR, and Docker. Most importantly, invest in your team. As part of all our engagements, we document what we implement top to bottom and prefer to partner so that we train teams to take over the system and are prepared to run it and build on it independently.

It’s wise to be cautious about this design pattern. Without the right implementation, microservices can become a net negative for your development. To implement it well, you need to clearly understand your systems’ boundaries and responsibilities. Standardizing your protocols and tools and adopting a consistent tech stack are critical—a multitude of tools, languages, or approaches can make it difficult to reason about how services interact. AWS services like ECS or EKS can be great for managing container orchestration, which you’ll need to make deploying services scalable, rapid, and automated. Centralized logging, through services like AWS CloudWatch, can also help you better understand and keep track of your environment.