Uplifting Resiliency for a Core Mediality Business Application
Cevo was engaged by Mediality to uplift the resilience of a core business application, Publish. Utilising a Well-Architected Review and CevoResilienceCheck, this engagement resulted in a significant enhancement to the resiliency and reliability of the application, ensuring faster response times and improved customer experiences.
Resilience
Uplift for core business application
Resilience Check
Cevo NexusTM solution
Media
Industry
Mediality, formed in 2020 after the sale of Australian Associated Press (AAP), offers diverse media solutions to amplify and enhance news and information across publishing platforms. Mediality comprises four key business units: Mediality Racing, Pagemasters, Mediaverse and Medianet.
Business challenge
The Pagemasters business was operating a workload in AWS called Publish (aka Cognitives) which is a Content Management System (CMS) for publishing news. Cognitives currently hosts more than 80 sites and receives around one million requests per day.
The infrastructure had been designed and implemented by an external organisation and had been lifted and shifted into Mediality’s AWS environment. While a lift and shift of the application from the legacy datacentre into AWS solved an immediate problem at the time, the current state left a lot to be desired. Publish was neither a fast system, nor a robust one. Monitoring workload resources, change implementation, backups, fault isolation, and disaster recovery were all significant gaps that needed to be addressed due to the risks of reputational damage resulting in customer loss to competitors.
Solution
Following a previously successful engagement to redevelop Mediality Racing’s racing data platform, Cevo was engaged to uplift the resiliency of Publish. Cevo conducted a Well-Architected Review with a particular focus on the reliability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, leveraging CevoResilienceCheck. The CevoResilienceCheck ticked all the boxes: architecture, disaster recovery process documentation, operational processes and team capability, and deployment and operational tooling.
Cevo proposed using AWS services and best practices to deliver resilience to Mediality. Key components of the proposed solution included:
- Create more visibility around costing and right-sizing of the AWS services used in the current Cognitive account.
- Implement and improve automation and scripted processes for deployment rollback and day-to-day operations activities within the live environments, leveraging existing CI/CD toolsets.
- Adopt various AWS services to address the lack of visibility and control, including distributed tracing using AWS X-Ray for Serverless Components, Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics for synthetic testing of the application, Amazon Cloudwatch Log for application logging, and Amazon Cloudwatch Metrics for infrastructure monitoring.
- Develop and test a business continuity plan and disaster recovery process within the AWS environment.
- Conduct regular reviews of access controls and audit mechanisms.
- Implement AWS Account security guardrails and introduce active monitoring and reporting.
- Review and improve the existing caching mechanism.
After completing the CevoResilienceCheck and delivering the detailed path forward for Pagemasters, Cevo successfully implemented the steps required to uplift this core business application.
Outcomes
Throughout the engagement, Cevo worked collaboratively with the Mediality staff, fostering knowledge sharing and building a deep understanding of the unique challenges and requirements of the Pagemasters business. This collaboration resulted in a successful implementation of the CevoResilienceCheck recommendations, which has significantly enhanced the resiliency and reliability of the Publish application, ensuring faster response times and improved customer experiences. Other benefits include:
- Cost optimisation – Improved visibility around costing and right-sizing of the AWS services enables Mediality optimise their resource allocation and ensure efficient utilisation of their AWS infrastructure
- Automation and deployment – The introduction of streamlined deployment processes ensures consistency and reliability for deployment rollback and day-to-day operations activities within the live environments.
- Operational standards and monitoring – The adoption of various AWS services enables Mediality to set operational standards, monitor performance, and proactively identify and address potential issues.
- Business continuity and disaster recovery – By reducing the recovery time objective (RTO) from 8+ hours to 1 hour, Mediality significantly mitigated the risks associated with downtime and ensured minimal disruption to their operations in the event of a disaster.
- Access controls and security – The introduction of regular reviews of access controls and audit mechanisms help to maintain a secure environment, while security guardrails strengthen the overall security posture.
- Caching mechanism improvement – To deliver optimise performance and improve overall system responsiveness.
Ultimately, Cevo has enabled Mediality to resolve a key risk in their business by demonstrating how to achieve a highly resilient, secure, and well-run application stack through the use of AWS services. This successful delivery has further solidified Cevo’s reputation within Mediality as a trusted partner in delivering expert cloud enablement advice.
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