Pharmaceutical company maximizes application scalability and resiliency with AWS microservices

Solution

When Allergan Data Labs began their collaboration with Caylent, they had already started on the path to adopting Serverless Architecture on AWS for their new application. They were looking to leverage Kubernetes in addition to the AWS Lambda serverless compute service, to optimize performance and costs. Caylent brought their expertise to enable Allergan Data Labs on their transformation journey, providing them with the knowledge and implementation skillset needed to make the most out of their serverless adoption.

The company’s infrastructure needs had also further expanded beyond their rewards program application. Leaving aside their existing Serverless applications, all their digital functions would now require integration into Kubernetes. The Caylent team helped Allergan from the ground up, developing a containerizing workflow so that future product features can follow DevOps best practices in Amazon EKS, setting up AWS organizations and OKTA, building custom landing zones using AWS Control Tower, custom VPCs and more.

The team reworked both the front end and back end of the infrastructure to comply with a CI/CD deployment methodology. The architecture went from monolithic pipelines to smaller microservices, reducing deployment times from hours to minutes. These measures improved the environment significantly, boosting the team’s confidence in adding more workloads.

For security, Caylent helped Allergan develop a content delivery network with restrictions for data access across the organization. AWS Shield Advanced was enabled, protecting against DDoS threats. Audits were performed utilizing Veracode to check all of the infrastructure’s functions. AWS CloudWatch Metrics & Alarms, AWS X-Ray and DataDog were utilized for observability, monitoring, logging and alerting and Caylent helped Allergan migrate to a new and improved VPC architecture. Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances were leveraged to optimize costs.

The Caylent team also prioritized educating the Allergan Data Lab team in how to optimally utilize and manage the suite of services behind the infrastructure as well as adopt a DevOps culture within their team to improve the efficiency and speed of deployments for their application. The team provided documentation and held tutorials and lunch and learn sessions to tackle various key topics, from understanding and utilizing best practices in CI/CD to managing and operating in Kubernetes. One of the main objectives behind this education focus was to enable Allergen Data Labs to be independent and avoid vendor lock-in – something that happens often when vendors utilize proprietary tools and methodologies to solve problems, limiting the client’s ability to understand and manage their own solutions.

Beyond transforming the application environment, the Caylent team realized that for events such as Botox Day to be successful, transformation would be required across other applications managed by other Allergan organizations, that were hosted upon traditionally configured virtual machines, treated like data center servers. This was because the new application Allergan was developing, had shared dependencies with this older platform. To resolve this, the Caylent team proactively reached out to the other organizations, helping them improve the scalability and resilience of the infrastructure supporting their applications.