May 12, 2021
Cloud

Cheppers helps OpenScholar to improve their cloud infrastructure

Author photo
Tassy János
Cloud Engineer

OpenScholar used a customized AWS web hosting stack for Drupal to host their multi-site SaaS solution. To meet their needs Cheppers embedded a skilled DevOps Engineer within their team to stabilize their current platform, improve performance of their infrastructure, and implement feature/functional enhancements as the client’s technological and business needs continue to evolve.

banner

Introduction

OpenScholar makes it easy for research institutions and their faculty to have professional, research-centric websites, and to bring their ideas to the world. Their product is a SaaS offering of OpenScholar software coupled with end-to-end services: hosting, training, theming & full help desk support.

Cheppers has been about creating something awesome since 2012—whether it’s building websites that perfectly balance aesthetics and functionality or highly available cloud-based services at scale. We strive to understand our clients, and build real, longer lasting partnerships with our team.

Cheppers is known as a very technical shop numbering over 70 full-time employees working with more than 25 different technologies.

Initial project status

OpenScholar used a customized AWS web hosting stack for Drupal to host their multi-site SaaS solution. To meet their needs Cheppers embedded a skilled DevOps Engineer within their team to stabilize their current platform, improve performance of their infrastructure, and implement feature/functional enhancements as the client’s technological and business needs continue to evolve.

Key challenges

  • Insufficient in-house AWS expertise
  • Development environments with varying configurations hosted outside of managed infrastructure
  • Improper metrics gathering
  • Insufficient alerting and notifications
  • Unoptimized resource sizing
  • Lack of automation to handle day-to-day tasks

Implementation highlights

  • Migrated development environments to similar ones as production on AWS
  • Implemented CloudWatch log streaming, metrics collection, dashboards, alerts
  • Reconfigured software all around the stack (nginx, Varnish, Apache, php-fpm, etc) and optimized for performance and scalability
  • Optimized resource usage and types for cost effectiveness (EC2, RDS, ElastiCache, etc.)
  • Provided 24/7 support and monitoring for the infrastructure
  • Implemented custom tooling to manage the production infrastructure and development resources

Results

  • Decreased infrastructure costs by 30-40% depending on traffic
  • Reduced downtimes via analyzing and fixing recurring issues
  • Improved service monitoring
  • Significantly reduced response time by infrastructure and software optimizations

Technologies used

  • AWS: CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, Auto Scaling, Load Balancing, RDS Aurora, ElastiCache, Elastic File System, S3, CloudFront, CloudWatch
  • PHP, Ruby
  • Varnish, nginx, Apache httpd, php-fpm

Related posts

banner
Author
2022-11-17
Cloud

Cheppers delivered a highly available, fault tolerant, auto-scaling cloud infrastructure to host the websites with high performance and optimized costs.

banner
Author
2021-05-10
Cloud

The My League Online (MyLO) system was developed by the League of Women Voters of California for use by all Leagues to develop their own websites.

Improving Drupal Performance on AWS with ProxySQL and Amazon Aurora MySQL
Author
2023-04-06
Cloud

Learn how to overcome Drupal's MySQL scalability issues on AWS and achieve horizontal scaling using ProxySQL and Amazon Aurora MySQL read replicas.