Modernisation Case Study

The challenge

RCI commissioned Rebura to design, implement and document their development infrastructure.

In addition to the primary objective ,Rebura provided some project training to teach the AWS fundamentals to the RCI team and documentation to highlight the infrastructure post-completion.

During the initial consultancy, Rebura worked with various different parts of the business to understand how each department needs to interact with the infrastructure. There were some key considerations for Rebura when considering the best architecture, including:

• Zero single point of failures
• High availability
• Highly secure systems with minimal exposure to the outside world
• Scalable infrastructure to cope with demand during busy periods but no run underutilised systems

As an international recognised brand, in a hugely competitive market, reputation management was one of the key points that all departments were keen to impart, meaning we needed a system that was secure, scalable and always available.

The solution

RCI are now able to utilise and benefit from the latest advances in AWS for their development infrastructure.

Once Rebura had completed the initial design phase, it was time to implement and document the solution. Rebura spent ten days on site at RCI implementing the proposed development infrastructure design and guiding the on-premise IT team on AWS and key areas of the technology. The handover document and solution covered a variety of areas, including:

• Security – multi-factor authentication, password policies, IAM users and groups
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Inc routing and security groups
• Subnets
• Instances
• Backup and DR
• Elastic Load Balancers
• Auto-Scaling
• Certificates
• Network Diagrams
• How to guides

The results

We set triggers so that we know when the servers are being over or underworked.

RCI are now able to utilise and benefit from the latest advances in AWS for their development infrastructure. Rebura were able to design, implement, build and train the RCI team.

• Advanced Monitoring – utilising the advanced monitoring tool we are notified of imminent failures, performance irregularities and other important overviews. The monitoring is also important for the running of the Autoscaling groups. We set triggers that know when the servers are being over or underworked and this will notify the Autoscaling group to take corrective action (spin servers up or down)
• Backup – the backup services of this design live in a tertiary availability zone (eu-west-3). These are kept separate so that are not affected by an outage in any other availability zone. Our backup and DR designs cater for all RPO and RTOs
• Zero single point of failures – there are no single point of failures, each server is duplicated at least once, services run across multiple datacentres and data is stored in replicated storage
• High availability – by eradicating single points of failures and introducing Autoscaling groups we have designed an infrastructure that scales up or down to meet the requirement of the end user.
• Highly secure systems with minimal exposure to the outside world – utilising a private and public subnet has allowed us to minimise exposed instances to the web servers, furthermore these web servers are only available through secure https.
• Scalable infrastructure – a system which scales up & down to meet the demand in traffic.