kubernetes
  • Data Security company
  • Offers comprehensive data protection for the data at rest
  • Offers Real time data monitoring and governance
  • Ensures trust and compliance.

Challenge

Client challenge involves managing multiple Kubernetes clusters for various application environments, handling cluster upgrades, maintaining Helm charts for both applications and monitoring, ensuring infrastructure stability, and establishing robust end-to-end monitoring from applications to infrastructure.

Solution

StackExpress has maintained a strong technical expertise and followed the containerisation journey from the onset of Docker to maturity of Kubernetes. StackExpress engineers have supported application containerisation, Kubernetes cluster deployment and management for many years now. This client organization required a reliable provider that has strong competency in managing multi-cloud infrastructure and well-versed with Kubernetes as an application hosting platform. StackExpress ticked all boxes and after a quick ramp up, a team of engineers started to serve the client. Fast-forward 3 years, we continue to serve the client to the best of global industry standard.

Challenge

Our client faces several challenges, including the need to migrate their applications to AWS ECS effectively. They aim to establish best practices and ensure synchronization of Terraform repositories. Additionally, there is a requirement to identify and execute improvements for their existing application image builder and deployment pipeline. Our client also seeks assistance in addressing routine infrastructure operations requirements. Moreover, periodic security and maintenance projects are essential to maintain compliance standards. Finally, they are looking to implement a 24x7 monitoring team with on-call SRE support to enhance their operational reliability

Solution

StackExpress has a strong track record of successfully assisting organizations in their transition to cloud-native architecture. We initiated this journey by focusing on containerization and migrating workloads to AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS).

One of the initial challenges we encountered was the presence of outdated Terraform repositories that had fallen out of sync with AWS deployments across various application environments. Our team promptly addressed this issue, ensuring that the repositories were brought up to date to align with the client's evolving infrastructure requirements.

To strengthen the client's operational resilience, we've established a proficient 24/7 first-responder support team. This team is further reinforced by on-call Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) who provide dedicated support when needed. In a short timeframe, we resolved operational issues reported by the client while consistently meeting our service level agreement (SLA) commitments.

Our client can now confidently proceed with an optimized, cloud-native infrastructure, supported by our reliable expertise.

project logo Enterprise-level
  • Enterprise-level provider of innovative cloud contact center software
  • Offers frictionless communication, billing, and self-payment options
  • Focused in area of healthcare and financial services industries
project logo Company specializes
  • Company specializes in marketplace revenue optimization.
  • Offers a unified system for organic search, promotions, and advertising integration.
  • Utilizes machine learning for personalized search results.
  • Enhances visibility and sales by promoting the most relevant listings.

Challenge

The challenge at hand involves the need to build application services infrastructure entirely from the ground up. This infrastructure must not only be designed to ensure security but also cater to low-latency requirements, scaling to meet internet-scale demands. Additionally, there is a requirement to create a comprehensive local development environment that faithfully replicates production conditions. Furthermore, the solution must facilitate secure access to different application environments, ensuring data integrity and confidentiality. Lastly, the task involves assisting in the assessment and selection of suitable data streaming deployment options, which will play a critical role in the overall architecture.

Solution

Following a comprehensive review and extensive discussions, the StackExpress team successfully deployed various application environments and components on AWS ECS and AWS EKS. The architecture was meticulously crafted to meet low-latency requirements, ensuring seamless integration into the end-user experience. In addition, StackExpress provided a complete local development environment that effectively emulated the production environment on a smaller scale. To optimize infrastructure management, the team established an efficient build pipeline using GitHub Actions, while also utilizing Terraform and Makefiles, adhering to industry best practices for seamless operations.

Challenge

Our client faces several critical challenges in their digital infrastructure. They require the secure management of both existing and forthcoming cloud assets, necessitating the continuous maintenance and upgrading of Kubernetes clusters and Helm charts. Additionally, the client seeks to enhance their operational insights by incorporating advanced business and infrastructure analytics. Furthermore, they aim to optimize their cloud infrastructure for efficiency and cost-effectiveness while ensuring robust logging and monitoring solutions for heightened observability across their entire ecosystem.

Solution

The StackExpress team, leveraging its extensive experience in managing digital currency exchanges, promptly addressed the client's needs. Following a smooth onboarding process, the team enhanced security for existing internal applications by implementing OAuth and multi-factor authentication (MFA) with varying privileges for different teams, simplifying access management. To improve visibility and monitoring, a comprehensive observability platform was established, utilizing well-established components like Elasticsearch, Fluent-bit, Kibana, Prometheus, and Grafana. This setup included informative application and infrastructure dashboards on Grafana for valuable insights. Additionally, StackExpress carried out multiple rounds of cost optimization efforts across the AWS infrastructure, resulting in noticeable reductions in monthly expenses.

project logo three
  • Our client is a prominent leader in the digital asset industry.
  • They provide a wide array of digital asset trading services.
  • Renowned as a trusted partner, they cater primarily to institutional investors.
project logo two
  • Optimize AWS costs
  • Spot instances and ClusterK management
  • Move existing static EC2 infrastructure to Cloud Formation templates, utilizing auto-scaling and on-demand infrastructure
  • Implementing Secure IAM policies for all users and resources
  • Migration existing EC2 infrastructure to VPC
  • Custom AMI in various AWS regions
  • Migration from private cloud to EC2, and vice-versa

Challenge

Client is a startup hosted entirely on AWS. They started with 2 EC2 instances, and now have 20+ EC2 instances along with various other AWS services. The entire deployment on AWS is managed by hand. The client's team was spending most time handling peak overload, instance management and alerts. The CEO wants a reliable partner who can handle infrastructure, while employing the best practices, so that their software engineers can stay focused on making their product better.

Solution

StackExpress AWS specialists came up with a parallel infrastructure using Cloudformation, VPC, IAM, and Auto-scaling, making way for a more secure, and scalable infrastructure. After testing, and client review, the existing services were migrated to this new infrastructure over next few weeks. Once StackExpress's migration team handed over the deployment to our DevOps team, we completed the deployment with monitoring, and alerts to make sure the application maintains a healthy SLA.

Challenge

Our client needed to migrate its MySQL database from an EC2 instance to AWS RDS MySQL for simplified management, upgrades, and monitoring. To ensure the security of confidential personal data, encryption at rest was essential. Additionally, as part of a disaster recovery strategy, the client stored MySQL backups on a separate cloud service, emphasizing the need for encryption. On the application front, they aimed to upgrade their Ruby stack to newer stable releases without causing disruptions.

Solution

After assessing the client's needs, StackExpress devised a comprehensive MySQL database migration plan that addressed security and other enhancements as per their expectations. Once approved, we executed the migration swiftly and efficiently. Subsequently, we implemented secure off-site backups, protected by multiple keys, ensuring data integrity and disaster recovery. We also upgraded their Custom AMIs to the latest stable Ruby release, rigorously testing the application to avoid disruptions. As a bonus, we updated their CloudFormation setup, enabling a seamless rolling application upgrade process.

Manage MongoDB deployments
  • Manage MongoDB deployments (single container/instance to sharding, clustering)
  • Manage PostgreSQL databases
  • Manage MySQL databases
  • Migrate databases to/from RDS
Manage configuration
  • Manage configuration and deployments using Ansible, Chef or Salt-stack
  • Migrate from existing scripts/Makefiles to deployment managed by Ansible or Chef

Challenge

Our client was using Makefiles for their deployments. While the whole process was pretty refined and mostly pain-free, the possibility of dynamic changes, along with a simpler way of specifying complex changes on multiple targets, was limited. The client wanted to use something that would provide them with an easy yet flexible DSL and the ability to generate deployment-specific configurations dynamically.

Solution

StackExpress had relied on Chef for many years across a range of deployment scenarios, from small to large and simple to complex. Chef proved to be a suitable choice for meeting the client's requirements, thanks to its platform-agnostic nature (in most cases) and an easy-to-use DSL. It also offered the flexibility of incorporating Ruby code, enabling dynamic and adaptable configurations. Over the following months, as part of ongoing AWS infrastructure enhancements, we systematically transitioned their entire workload to Chef.

Challenge

Our client established a widely accessible, free cloud learning platform that gained significant popularity among students, hobbyists, and professional developers. It frequently featured in discussions on developer sites, such as StackOverflow.com. As a product-focused company, the client made the strategic decision to reallocate their internal resources to their core product. Consequently, they sought a capable agency to assume the responsibility of maintaining the learning platform, ensuring that it adhered to high standards on par with or surpassing those upheld by the client's in-house team.

Solution

Although StackExpress primarily specializes in DevOps consulting and operational support services, we also have an small outstanding team of full-stack, backend, and frontend developers. After a successful interview process with the client, they were impressed with our development workflow. We commenced with a small project for their platform, and today, we autonomously manage every facet of this platform, continually introducing new features and improvements.

Custom app development
  • Custom app development in Node.js, Ruby and Python
  • Technical guidance on architecture, components, and development practices
staging, QA and dev environment
  • Setup a staging, QA and dev environment
  • Monitoring setup. 24x7 monitoring and alert response
  • ELK / Graylog setup
  • Managing entire cloud deployments ( AWS, GCE and Digital Ocean )
  • Assist in mitigating DoS/DDoS attacks

Challenge

Our client maintains a well-managed tech stack deployed on AWS EC2 and has an existing DevOps services provider overseeing it. However, they require round-the-clock alert monitoring, a requirement that their current DevOps provider cannot fulfill

Solution

StackExpress provides 24x7 alert management and response services, which are highly sought-after by most of our clients. Our roots in the public cloud and shared hosting management have instilled a deep commitment to meeting SLAs across all time zones. We offer support for various monitoring tools, ranging from on-premise Nagios deployments to New Relic and Datadog. Simply integrate us into your PagerDuty or Opsgenie on-call schedule to take advantage of our expertise.

Challenge

Our client had entrusted us with the management of a Docker-based public learning cloud platform. In pursuit of performance and cost objectives, the platform relied on a private Docker registry. However, when Docker introduced a superior but backward-incompatible v2 registry, the need for migration arose. This was essential not only to harness the benefits of the new Docker registry but also to ensure future compatibility.

Solution

While migrating a regular Docker-based application stack with only a few application images is typically straightforward, our challenge in this instance was the sheer volume — tens of thousands of images needed migration. Despite this considerable task, our team successfully completed the migration within a week. Additionally, we actively reported numerous encountered bugs throughout the process, contributing valuable feedback to enhance the upstream registry migration tool

Registry migration
  • Docker registry migration
  • Docker based application lifecycle management
  • Docker upgrade
learning platform
  • Specialized learning platform for students with special needs.
  • Utilizes evidence-based practices and research-validated curricula.
  • Serves educators, parents, and professionals with their products and services.

Challenge

Our client was looking for a DevOps Service provider with demonstrated track record in effectively managing production-ready cloud environments while also needing assistance in the ongoing management, monitoring, and updates of their existing cloud-based infrastructure. Additionally, they were looking to architect a new infrastructure for an upcoming project involving Docker, Kubernetes, and ECS, as well as establish and maintain efficient CI/CD pipelines.

Solution

StackExpress, a leading cloud services provider, effectively addressed the client's challenges by showcasing a robust portfolio of global references, illustrating our expertise in managing production application environments with varying levels of autonomy and stringent security requirements. Our team successfully executed diverse containerization projects, including Dockerization of existing applications and the setup and management of AWS ECS and AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service). We diligently maintained and enhanced application Helm charts, aligning with industry best practices for reliable Kubernetes deployments. Bitbucket Pipelines were meticulously established to adhere to secure build pipeline best practices for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Furthermore, we implemented an EFK (Elasticsearch, Fluent-bit, Kibana) based application logging pipeline to enhance application observability. Additionally, our team ensured secure access to cloud infrastructure through the implementation of an industry-leading VPN solution.