Cheppers helps OpenScholar to improve their cloud infrastructure
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.

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
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