The Insight
With more than 30 years of experience and operations across the world’s manufacturing and distribution hubs, D.W. Morgan has honed unique expertise to custom tailor, manage and execute transportation for many of the industry’s leading supply chains. The business stands on the promise of an end-to-end network to discover the best methods to leverage cost savings for your needs. Their consistent operational excellence helps manufacturers ensure their goods get to the right place at the right time, most efficiently and cost-effectively.
The Chronos Cloud/DW Morgan IaC and DevOps Project
D.W. Morgan approached our team at Apper to improve their cloud infrastructure and application architecture. The company had tried implementing a hybrid architecture before but needed something to work better for them. They wanted to know more about the benefits of a fully managed cloud environment, and they wanted to learn more about what kinds of companies are using AWS and how they’re doing it.
Our team at Apper Digital has years of experience developing and implementing advanced IT solutions. After three months of working with DW Morgan, we helped them improve their existing infrastructure and architecture while also helping them identify new growth opportunities.
Apper is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner that provides professional consulting services for cloud infrastructure, application architecture, cost optimization, and cloud security. We are also an AWS 50 Certified Partner, with over 50 AWS certifications within our team to ensure the proper knowledge and expertise to meet our partner’s demands.
On Increased Operational Efficiency
In the quantitative aspect, Apper, in partnership with AWS, helped increase operational efficiency by implementing IaC and CI/CD.
Regarding Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Implementation, AWS CodePipeline enabled automated infrastructure provisioning and multi-region deployment, making recovering from a disaster easy and with lesser downtime. Utilizing AWS CloudFormation Templates created by Apper allowed Chronos Cloud and DW Morgan to quickly provision or replicate resources without depending on a single person. In line with that, consistent application environment configuration reduced application bugs and cloud infrastructure errors resulting in increased productivity and better software.
In terms of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) Implementation, which automates the provisioning of infrastructure to eliminate their dependency on a single person, they enabled multiple people for their deployments. This improvement allows them to make configuration changes immediately to each non-production and production environment. Moreover, for cost optimization, adding AWS CloudFormation features like nested stack will enable them to customize resources’ configuration per environment while maintaining infrastructure consistency.
On Failure management through AWS CloudFormation and AWS CodePipeline
A Disaster Recovery plan was created using AWS CloudFormation and AWS CodePipeline for ChronosCloud and D.W. Morgan. With automated infrastructure provisioning and multi-region deployment, ChronosCloud and D.W. Morgan can provision resources with minimal downtime to another region.
On Increased operational excellence and security posture through AWS Systems Manager
Apper implemented a secured and easy-access container application with Amazon ECS Exec, which uses AWS Systems Manager Session Manager.
On Improved operational excellence through AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation templates and nested stack allowed Chronos Cloud and D.W. Morgan to efficiently replicate the configuration of resources. Naming and tagging of resources per environment were also standardized with the help of these templates.
On Securing database credentials through AWS Secrets Manager
Through AWS CloudFormation, master credentials (username and password) for application databases are generated and stored by AWS Secrets Manager. Database credentials are not hardcoded in any configuration file or application code; applications can utilize the AWS SDK to retrieve the credentials from Secrets Manager to connect to the database.
Apper Digital is an Advanced Tier APN (Amazon Web Services Partner Network) Consulting Partner that provides professional consulting services for cloud infrastructure, application architecture, cost optimization, and cloud security. Apper is also an AWS 50 Certified Partner, with more than 50 AWS certifications within the team to ensure the proper knowledge and expertise to meet our partners’ demands.
The complete list of services implemented by Apper Digital includes the following:
- AWS CloudFormation
- AWS CodeCommit
- AWS CodeBuild
- AWS CodePipeline
- Amazon CloudFront
- AWS Elastic Load Balancer
- Amazon Elastic Container Registry
- Amazon ECS (EC2)
- AWS Elastic Compute Cloud
- AWS Auto Scaling Groups
- AWS Simple Storage Service
- AWS ElastiCache (Redis)
- Amazon Elasticsearch
- Amazon Relational Database Service (Postgres)
- Amazon DynamoDB
- AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store
- AWS Systems Manager Session Manager
- AWS Secrets Manager
- VPC components and services (Security Groups, NACLs, NAT Gateways, EIP)
For more information on how Apper Digital can help your business transform, talk to us.