Third-party authentication and grading services provider leverages the AWS Migration Acceleration Program for modern containerized infrastructure

50%

Increase in Development & Innovation

40%

Increase in Database Productivity

By adopting AWS, Collectors' engineering team has increased development by at least 50% and has experienced 40% greater productivity through improved speeds available on databases that have been moved to the cloud.

Collectors provides third-party authentication and grading services to collectors, retail buyers, and sellers of collectibles. Their mission is to help collectors pursue their passion through industry-leading grading and authentication, tools to help collectors research and find the next big thing, and marketplaces to buy and sell.

Founded in 1986 as Professional Coin Grading Services (PCGS), Collectors expanded their focus to sports cards and other collectibles over the subsequent decades. With more than 1500 employees, Collectors has certified more than 75 million collectibles since its first certified coin in 1986.

Challenge

Collectors had experienced tremendous growth since 2020, and realized that their infrastructure had existing sprawl across multiple clouds and on-prem data centers. This large footprint was leading to issues for the team and legacy infrastructure limited important functions like scalability, DR planning and interconnectivity. Collectors wanted to use the opportunity to consolidate onto AWS to not only get out of the data center in a timely manner but also to adopt containers and EKS among other initiatives to modernize their infrastructure.

Having had difficulty finding a reliable partner in the past familiar with SMB to lead the migration, Collectors quickly partnered with Caylent and hit the ground running to migrate to modern infrastructure on AWS, built to their needs. Caylent mobilized quickly to support Collectors with the necessary DevOps and CloudOps resources needed to help Collectors fully utilize their new environment.

Caylent was able to quickly understand our business problem and was able to identify the correct resources. What impressed me with Caylent was that they felt like an extension of our team, it didn’t feel like it was a consulting company, it felt more like a partnership where we could brainstorm ideas, and with their experience, they were able to let us know what worked and so we were able to effectively skip all of those lessons learned and implement our migration more effectively.

Tri Trinh

VP, Engineering

Solution

By leveraging AWS’s Migration Acceleration Program, Caylent led the migration to quickly get core services for Collectors’ main applications up and running in production in AWS in less than two months. Caylent deployed AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform, EKS blueprints, and Karpenter to quickly get Collectors started with modern containerized infrastructure defined in IaC that met both AWS and Caylent’s well-architected standards.

Caylent enabled CI/CD for Collectors’ core infrastructure by building deployment pipelines triggered by github actions. Caylent built an Aurora database for the Collectors team which offered high availability and recovery options the team knew were critical to a good user experience and business longevity.

Once the migration of the main application and database were completed, Collectors continued to partner with Caylent to manage the environment, conduct knowledge transfer to get Collectors’ DevOps and cloud ops teams up to speed on their new environment, and enable future migrations and optimizations for Collectors.

As part of the knowledge transfer, the Caylent pod led workshops for the Collectors teams to familiarize them with IaC-based deployment models and containerized infrastructure. Caylent worked with Collector’s security team to implement and recommend AWS native security tooling like AWS Security Hub and Amazon Guard Duty. Caylent also vetted and supported 3rd party tooling for the customer and continues to work closely with the customer to optimize their AWS infrastructure based on product and customer needs specific to the SMB industry.

Results

By migrating to AWS in a quick manner Collectors was able to benefit from economies of scale, consolidation of sprawl, and improvement in performance around recovery abilities, scalability, and the overall resiliency of their product for users. By partnering closely with Caylent pods, Collectors was able to reach further maturity on AWS and develop the necessary skills in-house to ensure longevity and success on AWS and properly leverage all of the benefits that come along with modernization.

Caylent was able to bring Collectors to modern cloud infrastructure on EKS and then was able to support Collectors through their journey to ensure they had the process and technical know-how to leverage these benefits and grow their internal capabilities to take advantage of the cloud.

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