Fitness management and messaging platform rearchitects and containerizes entire AWS cloud infrastructure

Solution

Caylent responded to these challenges by offering sportsYou a partnership driven approach, with Caylent acting as an internal DevOps and platform team. This was supported by a small team of Caylent DevOps engineers working directly with the SportsYou engineering team in a proactive, hands-on environment, made possible through our unique DevOps-as-a-Service offering. Rather than continue experiencing delays waiting for responses to break/fix tickets and minimum rules of engagement governed by slow ticket-driven responses, Caylent engineers were available via shared Slack channels just like a normal sportsYou team member. As core DevOps principles, feedback loops and shared learning became top priorities. To help facilitate that, Caylent engineers joined the SportsYou team in stand up calls, planned and implemented new tasks using an Agile methodology, facilitated by a Kanban board.

Initially, Caylent’s focus was to assist sportsYou in securing its AWS account and regaining the root keys. Once sportsYou had regained control of their accounts and environments, Caylent helped implement IAM role permissions and cross-account IAM role switching for both parties according to the principle of least privilege.

The next step involved setting up appropriate environments (e.g., development, staging, production, etc.) in segregated accounts and linked via consolidated billing, while rearchitecting sportsYou’s AWS infrastructure consistent with best practices. The sportsYou application was containerized and EKS environments were deployed to manage the container workloads. Infrastructure was designed with HA and autoscaling in mind, continuous delivery was introduced, and resources were streamlined to drastically improve cost-efficiency.

Results

Within the first month of working with Caylent, sportsYou saw a 40% reduction in their monthly AWS bill. Additionally, sportsYou’s infrastructure is now handling 300% more load due to traffic growth and supporting millions of service requests per day. With Caylent’s assistance, sportsYou is now running Kubernetes in production on AWS using Amazon EKS, and application deployments are facilitated through Helm Charts. These are just a few of the new technologies Caylent has introduced to the sportsYou development team for improving productivity and automation. SportsYou also intend to realize the DevOps practice of Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC) through templates that Caylent are building for them on the code software tool Terraform.

Caylent’s partnership with sportsYou, time-to-value was decreased dramatically and we eliminated all single points of failure and reduced risk. In addition, Caylent helped improve the team’s development workflow by introducing DevOps best practices. Furthermore, we advanced sportsYou’s security posture—something they’d been thinking about for the last 12 months. Caylent is now supporting sportsYou to actively tackle cloud security in part by implementing Twistlock which provides runtime alerts, image vulnerability scanning, forensics, and intrusion prevention.