Modern DevOps Brings Enhanced Performance to Public Sector Education Company

Challenge

Before engaging with CleanSlate, the last time NCFL had their site updated was 4-5 years ago. It was hosted on another provider and not correctly implemented for AWS best practices. The site was experiencing high latency & stability issues. They needed help stabilizing and modernizing the infrastructure for one of their critical sites called Wonderopolis.

Additionally, the base code of the site had many revisions over the years, and there was a lot of legacy code, making it hard to understand what was going on and what was impacting the site; it needed a refactor. NCFL has used 3rd parties in the past, therefore, we were unaware of the historical changes. NCFL has passed the responsibilities off to other third parties, meaning they weren’t aware of some of the issues. Finally, they faced problems with security, stability, and an unacceptable amount of downtime and outages.

Overall, there were concerns that if it was left unaddressed, certain security issues could potentially evolve into larger problems.

Solutions

Using a variety of DevOps tools and practices, we were able to significantly improve the customers' environment. NCFL had its database running on EC2 instances, but it was not backed up or secured appropriately. CleanSlate helped by modernizing the application and moving the database to RDS; we increased the availability and backups of their database. We provided NCFL with an appropriate VPC so we could secure the web instances into private subnets instead of allowing them to be publicly accessible which would mitigate the risk of port scans and other malicious actors attempting to compromise the site.

Additionally, we helped refactor the code base and roll out the code by creating CI/CD pipelines. This allows new features to be added to the code and the infrastructure, automatically based on check-ins to their GitHub repositories. As a part of our effort, we created a test environment so that when they want to make changes to their code, they can see them before they roll them out to the customer, which is helpful for their future engagements.

Results & Additional Info

CleanSlate used modern DevOps to enhance the performance of the application with the existing code base to follow AWS best practices. Our implementations reduced their downtime by 90%, improved the performance of their infrastructure by 40%, and the CI/CD pipelines decreased roll-out time for new code from weeks to just minutes.