How Lucidity leveraged ECS Fargate to become a global player
Lucidity identified an opportunity to grow its customer base and expand into global markets. However, the existing infrastructure, deployed on EC2 instances, inhibited that growth. Utilising AWS best practices and the Well-Architected Framework, Cevo helped Lucidity re-architect to provide the support, scalability, security and flexibility required for future growth.
International expansion
Enabled
AWS ECS Fargate
Solution
Independent Software Vendor
Industry
Lucidity Software is a software as a service (SaaS) company that offers an all-in-one health, safety, environment and quality (HSEQ) software solution designed to ensure the health and safety of all employees whether on-site, remote or contractors. Designed with dedicated workplace health and safety (WHS) software modules, Lucidity provides a tailored, cloud-based solution that provides management teams access to the crucial business data they need to keep their people safe.
Business challenge
Lucidity had identified new opportunities for growth, including the potential for expansion outside of Australia. However, several challenges were identified as inhibitors for that growth, including:
- The existing infrastructure was deployed on standalone EC2 instances, which limited the scalability and flexibility required to support expansion.
- There was a need to re-architect the existing stack in a way that could not only support the expansion and ongoing scalability, but also service clients on various versions of the software through automated pipelines, without impacting current clients.
- Existing infrastructure was deployed manually and Infrastructure as Code was non-existent, meaning that international expansion would be an incredibly time-consuming process.
- There was a need to uplift the security posture of the stack, including the segregation of the non-production and production workloads into separate AWS accounts and implement data encryption at rest.
Lucidity needed a partner to help re-architect to provide support for future growth, including international expansion.
Solution
Lucidity engaged Cevo to address the aforementioned challenges and re-architect for future growth in an efficient, scalable, secure and cost optimised way, over the course of approximately eight months.
Lucidity’s existing AWS infrastructure was deployed through a mixture of Ansible automation and ClickOps, meaning it wasn’t possible to quickly re-deploy in a new market. Cevo experts worked with Lucidity’s internal teams to build Infrastructure as Code using Cloudformation. Cevo experts also configured the AWS CI/CD pipelines to deploy the infrastructure consistently. By aligning their infrastructure as code to AWS best practices, Lucidity can leverage the scalability and flexibility of technologies such as AWS ECS Fargate, and expand to new markets quickly and cost efficiently.
Lucidity’s existing infrastructure, deployed on standalone, non-scaling EC2 instances where packaged code was deployed through the Jenkins pipeline, greatly impacted the company’s ability to scale. Cevo assisted with re-architecting the stack, implementing ECS Fargate as a compute layer to facilitate scalability, in addition to containerising the application in line with ECS Fargate requirements.
One of the biggest challenges of this project was designing the new infrastructure in a way that could support the delivery of multiple versions of software to different clients. Cevo used the below architecture to deliver the solution, where each client is deployed as a separate service on the ECS cluster serving the particular version of software. This allowed for the compute layer for each client to be isolated.
The migration of clients from the existing stack to the new stack would be gradual over time, therefore the compute capacity requirement is dynamic in nature. However, the scalability and flexibility of AWS ECS Fargate eliminated any guesswork on Lucidity’s infrastructure capacity needs. Lucidity can access as much or as little capacity as needed, and scale up or down as required with only a few minutes notice.
The existing production and non-production workloads were deployed in a single AWS account. As a result, there was no capacity to implement the tighter access controls required for the production environment. Cevo worked closely with Lucidity’s internal team to comprehensively understand the existing architecture. Then, using the AWS Well-Architected Framework, Cevo experts designed a new multi-account architecture and deployed a multi-account setup using AWS Control Tower. This allows Lucidity to segregate their non-production and production workloads in different AWS accounts, uplifting the security posture of the stack.
Outcomes
This engagement resulted in the following business benefits for Lucidity:
- Enabled international expansion, significantly impacting the potential for an increased user base
- Reduced the infrastructure deployment timeframe from potentially weeks to only days
- Introduced scalability and flexibility in the infrastructure to support future growth and further market expansion
- Implemented encryption at rest and therefore helping Lucidity further protect their client data and maintain the high level of security alongside their ISO27001 data security certification
- Ability to deploy code on multiple client sites via automated pipelines without impacting existing customers
- Improved security via deployment of a multi-account setup
- Reduced operational overhead of managing the EC2 servers such as patching, securing and managing servers
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