Harvard OpenScholar cloud-based infrastructure transformation

The Harvard OpenScholar Drupal distribution provides universities, research institutes, and their affiliates with professional, knowledge-focused websites that allow them to easily show themselves to the world. In addition to Software as a Service (SaaS), they also provide end-to-end services: hosting and full product support, as well as training.

The task

OpenScholar used a customized AWS-based web hosting stack to run Drupal’s multi-site SaaS service. The task of our colleagues was first to stabilize the existing platform and then to increase performance and implement new features and enhancements, following the changing technological and business needs of the customer.

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