Agronomic guidance technology enables a quantum leap for the agricultural industry

Global-level company SupPlant’s mission is to qualitatively & quantitatively improve performance for agro-businesses worldwide, supplying farmers and agriculturists with up-to-date and actionable agronomic knowledge that changes the basic concept of irrigation practices.

According to WorldBank.org, in the majority of the world’s regions, 70% of water is used for agriculture. Close to 2050, when our planet will be feeding approximately 9 billion, people will need a 50% increase in agricultural production and a 15% increase in water retractions. It means that ensuring environmental sustainability and intelligent water management for precision irrigation is currently more than essential. Fortunately, SupPlant’s unique plant recognition technology (an advanced AI-powered precision farming platform) is capable of saving water on a global scale while maximizing water use efficiency, increasing yields, and boosting agribusinesses’ productivity.

Partnership Goals

Contemporary agricultural companies require modern data management instruments that make it much easier not only to collect data about their/around the world crops and weather/climatic changes and vulnerabilities but also properly process it; taking that new era for agricultural solutions is impossible without a personalized approach.

SupPlant’s unique AI-powered system uses an advanced algorithm that analyzes large amounts of live data (collected over 1500 growing seasons) from plants, soil, and weather sensors and converts it into irrigation recommendations and actionable insights. With that in mind, SupPlant’s unique platform was supposed to support highly frequent user operation and data management with significant load to meet the highest reliability and security standards of the agricultural industry.

Searching for a cost-efficient yet robust solution to improve its database framework in the AWS ecosystem, SupPlant turned to ProfiSea as an AWS Certified Consulting Partner to support the project and set up top-notch AWS-based database infrastructure components highlighting the importance of maintenance, availability, operability, reliability, and security improvements.

Why AWS?

Building a cloud environment on AWS is always a good idea considering that Amazon Web Services accounts for over half of cloud service users (52%), owns 34% of the global cloud market, as well as Netflix, Quora, NASA, Reddit, and Pinterest, like many other business giants, are hosted on AWS. AWS provides all the necessary infrastructure to make your entire system scalable and easy to manage.

AWS provides relational database services (RDS) for open source database engines such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. Services come with a variety of computing, memory, and storage options tailored to different workloads. Amazon RDS also offers multi-availability zone capabilities in most AWS regions to provide automatic failover and improve application availability.

Moreover, Amazon RDS, in general, and Amazon RDS for MySQL, in particular, streamline time & energy-consuming database-related tasks, typically accomplished manually. Amazon RDS allows you to perform complex mechanisms such as processing, cloning, and scaling with a simple API call or through the AWS Management Console.

Reaching the goals 

As a Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network, Profisea designed and implemented a well-architected SupPlant database architecture improvement plan helping facilitate faster collaboration for SupPlant’s teams by taking care of the following DevOps tasks:

• Establishing data multi-operational mechanism of large data volumes
• Implementing well-engineered business logic for data operations
• Setting up automated data backups and an effective disaster recovery plan
• Enabling high-availability of database environments via various Availability Zones
• Improving performance via detecting and resolving critical stability issues like slow SQL queries, slow requests, capacity bottlenecks, and sources of memory bloat and leaks
• Ensuring the safety of sensitive data via Amazon RDS for MySQL’s encryption
• Ensuring continuous data reading, data analytics, and reporting processes
• Guaranteeing and upholding a 99.999% uptime and enhanced fault tolerance capabilities that increased SupPlant customers’ satisfaction to 89% from 78%
• Establishing data architecture provisioning via IaC (infrastructure as code) practices using Terraform as a commercial templating solution
• Improving infrastructure maintainability and operability due to well-rounded automation with Amazon RDS for MySQL
• Increasing SupPlant’s teams’ productivity by 68% due to complete automation of previously manual data management processes
• Setting up continuous monitoring, notification systems, and continuous vulnerability checks for database workloads via AWS CloudFormation templates.

AWS services used: Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECR, Amazon Route53, Amazon S3, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS Certificate Manager.

Results

SupPlant experts developed an innovative AI-powered data collection and data management platform that handles large data volumes, in no small part thanks to using easy-to-setup & operate AWS services. Amazon RDS for MySQL dramatically simplifies building, managing, and scaling a rich database architecture in the cloud.

Leveraging Amazon RDS for MySQL allowed SupPlant’s experts to reduce maintenance/operation costs, easily change capacity to match their business needs, and automate time-consuming database workload provisioning. The well-designed and implemented SupPlant already existing AWS-based database architecture improvement plan helped notably increase customers’ satisfaction and free time to focus on more critical tasks for highly talented SupPlant teams.

DevOps boutique company trusted by Market Leaders

ProfiSea is an Israeli DevOps and Cloud boutique company that implements best practices of GitOps, DevSecOps, and Kubernetes-based Cloud environments deployment automation and provides FinOps premium services using a unique AI-based Cloud management platform.

Our mission is to help technology-driven companies and organizations connect all the dots between business, development, and operations to maximize performance, reduce costs and waste, shorten time to market, and create an agile application life cycle. No two clients are alike, so we develop customized, unique strategies based on their particular needs.

Quicklizard Brings Radical Change to the E-Commerce Industry

Quicklizard has taken the lead in transforming digital pricing for retailers and direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands. Powered by science and designed for success, Quicklizard’s platform has won over the E-commerce industry by presenting an end-to-end powerful pricing solution for E-commerce and omnichannel retailers. Quicklizard’s innovative AI-based platform constantly monitors and analyzes terabytes of information from multiple data sources, allowing customers to easily achieve pricing excellence at scale and outperform their business goals.

Quicklizard’s next-generation platform easily integrates between E-commerce and retail platforms to produce AI-powered pricing recommendations that allow customers to set optimal prices based on their business goals. To keep pace with Quicklizard’s business growth and customer base expansion in the European market, the company prioritized an infrastructure automation project that would enable it to migrate production versions to Europe. Their intention was to give their already well-designed AWS-based production environment an upgrade that called for security, reliability, scalability, and automation enhancements.

Partnership goals

With the rapidly growing popularity of its innovative AWS-based platform among retailers and E-commerce brands, Quicklizard’s decision-makers prioritized infrastructure automation that would facilitate migration of a slightly improved production version to the European market. After entering the European market, the need arose to create a separate cluster across AWS for Europe that would reduce latency for clients in this area. Quicklizard chose Profisea with the aim of working together to create a solution that focused on:

• designing and implementing the migration of the existing infrastructure from the USA to the European region
• adopting IaC (Infrastructure as Code) to increase speed, maintain consistency and reduce management overhead
• setting up a CI/CD pipeline to automate the software deployment/delivery process
• automating infrastructure to reduce timeframes and eliminate errors arising from manual configuration processes
• autoscaling to optimize resource utilization in real-time in preparation for traffic spikes
• implementing security management, system backups, and configuration management for better control and security.

The main goal was to achieve the highest level of automation while accelerating and simplifying infrastructure management. With the help of Profisea, a consulting partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN), Quicklizard achieved its goals by deploying several AWS cloud service solutions built on the best practices of GitOps, DevSecOps, and Kubernetes-based cloud environment deployment automation. Profisea’s AWS-certified Kubernetes-experienced DevOps experts provide the full spectrum of cloud services, from smart customization of existing environments to end-to-end cloud infrastructure design that meets customers’ business requirements.

Why AWS?

AWS provides all the infrastructure needed to easily configure and manage the entire system. The services are effective, agile, and flexible, which means that Quicklizard gets more automation and control while keeping costs under control. Among its advantages are scalability, high performance, reliability, and security and we could incorporate several AWS services to meet all of Quicklizard’s goals.

Amazon EKS helped make it easier to run Kubernetes on AWS. With it, the Kubernetes control plane is provisioned and scaled in various AWS availability zones, providing high availability and reducing the chance of system failure.

Amazon RDS also plays a considerable role in infrastructure automation. It provides cost-efficient and flexible capacity while automating cumbersome administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. Amazon RDS frees development teams to concentrate on more crucial things — applications that will provide new features, faster performance, security, and the compatibility they require. Furthermore, Amazon RDS has built-in flexibility and is therefore cost effective since one pays only for resources actually used.

Amazon ElastiCache can be used for caching, which increases application and database performance, or as a primary data store for short-term uses such as session stores, streaming, and analytics. Amazon CloudFront helps to deliver content to viewers at low latency and high transfer speeds. Migrating databases is no simple feat, but thanks to AWS Database Migration Service we were able to accelerate and simplify the transition.

Achieving the Customer’s Goals

To meet and surpass Quicklizard’s goals, Profisea’s experts actively leveraged AWS services and implemented the following steps:

• We evaluated the existing infrastructure and expanded it from the USA to the European continent with appropriate system updates.
• Our team implemented Infrastructure as a Code via Terraform.
• We moved workloads to AWS EKS and made them a part of CI/CD to automate processes.
• The databases were backed up for production from the USA to Europe and moved to Amazon RDS via AWS Database Migration Service.
• We set up scheduled backups of Amazon RDS for better data protection.
• We automated Terraform with Jenkins. All changes were made via MRs and Apps were deployed via Argo CD. Disaster recovery was set up and tested to reduce downtime.
• Our team created and ran a series of security tests. We also set up a VPN for increased security and privacy.

AWS services used:

Amazon EKS, Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Database Migration Service

Results

Profisea experts implemented an automation upgrade for Quicklizard’s AWS-based infrastructure so that Quicklizard’s customers could seamlessly enjoy a scalable, robust pricing platform to adapt to market changes and seize opportunities to increase revenue. Moreover, Quicklizard gets complete control of the system along with security visibility at scale. To our delight, our partner, Quicklizard, says they can now deploy their new features much faster. In addition, Quicklizard’s development team can deploy to production independently, saving time and allowing developers to focus on more critical aspects of the application.

Next Steps

Quicklizard plans to use the same solution to upgrade its production for American customers to match the incredible speed experienced in Europe and save more time. We also continue to work with Quicklizard by providing 24/7/365 technical support to their own team. Profisea’s NOC engineers monitor platform performance and infrastructure to ensure that everything works as intended and downtime is kept to a minimum.

Trusted by Market Leaders, Profisea Shakes Up Cloud-Based Ecosystems

Profisea is an Israeli DevOps and Cloud boutique company that implements best practices of GitOps, DevSecOps, Kubernetes-based Cloud environments deployment automation and provides FinOps premium services using a unique AI-based Cloud management platform.

Our mission is to help technology driven companies and organizations connect all the dots between business, development and operations areas to maximize performance, reduce costs and waste, shorten time to market and create an agile application life cycle. As no two clients are alike, we develop customized, unique strategies based on the particular needs of each.

A Bridge into the World of Digital Assets 

INX, the owner of two digital asset trading platforms, is undoubtedly succeeding in transforming the future of finance into reality by developing unique technology that makes highly-regulated digital asset trading fast, safe and secure.

INX’s experienced and dedicated team of business, finance, and technology veterans share a vision of redefining the world of regulated security tokens and cryptocurrency trading. To achieve their vision, they developed regulated, licensed, fully transparent, and secure online and mobile Platforms.

INX’s innovative platforms incorporate specific microservices-based API interface that provides broker-dealers, corporate financiers, traders, investors and market makers with an intuitive user experience as well as a powerful matching engine, complete regulatory oversight, uninterrupted operations, and timely trading support. With INX’s unique combination of expertise in traditional markets and a disruptive fintech approach, the company is a leader in serving the digital asset industry since from the outset INX opted to work in a regulated environment under regulatory oversight.

Partnership Goals

Given that INX’s innovative platform is designed to support high-frequency trading without downtime, INX management prioritized the reliability, stability, and high scalability of a proprietary platform for cross-border, high-volume crypto trading through its unique matching engine.

To achieve its vision, INX partnered with Profisea, an AWS Consulting Partner providing a full suite of cloud services based on best practices for cloud deployment automation. After conducting a thorough examination of all possible alternatives, Profisea offered INX an AWS-based solution which it tailored to INX’s well-architectured, cloud-based infrastructure.

Why AWS is the Right Choice

Amazon Web Services offers numerous reliable, scalable, and affordable cloud computing services for dozens of industries under their AWS ‘pay for what you use’ model and is free to join. AWS also offers additional computing power, virtual storage, databases, containers, cloud, blockchain and/or other functionalities — in short, they offer everything companies need to create sophisticated products with ease and flexibility.

Profisea considered AWS to be the best choice for the INX project because of its effectiveness, convenience, and scalability. It suited our partner’s goals perfectly, providing all necessary resources and services. When building a platform, the main advantage of AWS is that it does not limit developers to a pre-set amount of storage, bandwidth, or computing resources. As needs increase or decrease, developers can use as much or as little as they need and only pay for what they utilize.

Achieving the Goals

This is how Profisea tailored AWS to make it the perfect option for a project of this nature:

• Our team implemented Terraform for AWS infrastructure to prevent configuration drift and make collaboration easy. Terraform utilizes an immutable infrastructure approach to make updates in the development environment go smoothly, easily, and in a completely bug-proof way. This allowed INX to deploy the whole system over AWS in one click, enabling the overall deployment cycle to be fast, stable, and easy to maintain.
• We deployed all workloads into AWS EKS to automate load distribution and parallel processing. We also configured Amazon RDS to increase reliability and Amazon ElastiCache to accelerate application and database performance. Amazon Route53 was used to improve reliability with easy re-route configuration.
• We used CircleCI to build a CI/CD pipeline for INX. Grafana + Prometheus were adopted for Continuous Monitoring and Alerting. We provide INX with NOC support to monitor, maintain and optimize the network 24/7 and ensure there is no downtime.
• ArgoCD was implemented for Continuous Delivery, and Helm charts were adopted to define, install, and upgrade Kubernetes applications.
• СloudFlare was used to protect the customer from DDoS attacks.
• We utilized a customized FinOps solution (ProfiSea Labs) for cloud management and cloud cost optimization.
• We also implemented an agile development methodology.

As a result, Profisea helped INX’s highly professional experts create a cloud-based, secure, and profoundly reliable platform for crypto trading with an uptime of 99.99%. By using ProfiSea Labs, the customer was able to optimize their cloud costs and eliminate cloud waste.

AWS services used: AWS EKS, Amazon ECR, Amazon Route53, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS.

Results

Profisea and INX built a scalable, robust, and secure crypto platform powered by Kubernetes technology with AWS cloud services. The system supports the trading of various digital assets and is not limited to one or two blockchains. It includes a matching engine running behind a robust and scalable set of microservices and is based on a highly scalable architecture to support high-frequency trading with significant load. The INX and Profisea solution significantly reduced time to market and sustained the stability of the INX trading environment (uptime is 99.99% for 2021).

Profisea continues to work with INX via our dedicated remote NOC monitoring unit, which provides 24/7/365 technical support to the customer’s team. Profisea’s NOC experts monitor all platform processes, infrastructure, and transactions daily, with no exceptions. Our team also tests the platform’s basic functionality, checking that everything works as intended.

Boutique DevOps and Cloud Company Trusted by Market Leaders

Profisea is an Israeli DevOps and Cloud boutique company that implements best practices of GitOps, DevSecOps, Kubernetes-based Cloud environments deployment automation and provides FinOps premium services using a unique AI-based Cloud management platform.

Our mission is to help technology driven companies and organizations connect all the dots between business, development and operations areas to maximize performance, reduce costs and waste, shorten time to market and create an agile application life cycle. As no two clients are alike, we develop customized, unique strategies based on the particular needs of each.

GeoX is an award-winning Israeli AI analytics company that provides geospatial Property Data for insurance and real estate companies. Its Property SaaS Platform helps them perform reliable underwriting and correctly assess an entire insurance portfolio’s risks without physically visiting sites. GeoX patented AI uses Aerial Imagery, Machine Vision, and Deep Learning for fast and automated extraction of rich, accurate, 3D property data and dozens of its attributes. Such an approach enables significant cost reductions and lost revenue capturing.

Executive summary

GeoX sought a cost-efficient, prompt solution to migrate its development and production environments from their previous cloud platform to the AWS ecosystem. The company chose Profisea as AWS Certified Consulting Partner to support the project and set up all the AWS-based infrastructure components. Profisea’s main work scope was to seamlessly migrate all GeoX’s assets, leveraging only the AWS services relevant to the customer’s business and architectural needs. Profisea successfully completed the project within the timeframe and budget.

Tailored approach to the customer’s challenges

Following DevOps as a Service model, Profisea’s experts defined the roadmap, project phases, product backlog, tools, and milestones required for migration to AWS IaaS and PaaS solutions. As the customer SaaS product uses advanced Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, the environments are complex and have many elements that you could not lose during migration.

Hence, Profisea implemented Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) using Amazon CloudFormation, including ML infrastructure for SageMaker framework. Then, seamlessly moved the customer’s database directly to Amazon RDS via AWS Database Migration Service. Throughout the project, Profisea’s experts unified development and operations into a single agile delivery mechanism based on GeoX’s business needs, priorities, and organizational capacity.

Achieving the goals by using extensive expertise and the best industry tools

Profisea’s engineers effectively managed the customer’s cloud infrastructure and delivery cycle, helping facilitate faster collaboration and cross-functionality for GeoX’s teams. And took care of the following DevOps tasks:

1. Automation of Environments Building to enable additional environments creation as a part of Project Delivery
2. Seamless migration of existing cloud environments to AWS ecosystem
3. CI/CD best practices and Elastic Inference implementation, configuring pipelines to AWS VPCs
4. Adoption of container orchestration platform over AWS
5. Setup and configuration of continuous monitoring systems for various environments to gain performance and stability real-time feedback
6. Cloud security setup for AWS accounts to ensure compliance with the best practices of security and identity management

Profisea’s input that benefited the project

• Quickly and successfully migrated GeoX from previous cloud platform to the latest AWS services without downtime. This enabled the company’s enterprise-wide innovations with the newly created, explicit AWS system architecture for production and development labs.
• Single-handedly took care of the DevOps side, which relieved the customer’s employees from learning how to do everything in-house from scratch.
• Integrated Docker orchestration, using GitHub flow directed straight to Amazon EKS to facilitate flexibility in starting, running, and autoscaling Kubernetes applications in the AWS cloud or on-premise. It helps the customer to provide highly-available and secure clusters and automates critical tasks such as patching, node provisioning, and dockers’ updates.
• Set up advanced DevSecOps approach with the networking and security systems, using Amazon CloudFront CDN service combined with AWS WAF. These tools protect GeoX’s applications from common web exploits and vulnerabilities.

As a professional AWS Consulting Partner, Profisea provided the customer with world-class cloud migration services and robust Amazon instruments, achieving the project goals in time. GeoX continued its work during the migration process while the environments were being moved and approved on the AWS platform. The CI/CD cycle smoothly merged with the new infrastructure, and the full-on switch to AWS was finalized.

Our partner Sirin Labs is a top-notch smartphone manufacturer that operates since 2013. Well-established and backed by significant investors, with offices in Israel and Switzerland, the company bridges the gap between the blockchain economy and the mass market through extensive cybersecurity and outstanding user experience.

Using the leading communication technologies, Sirin Labs develops a premier blockchain-enabled, cyber-protected smartphone with a built-in cold storage wallet. It’s a state-of-the-art device that has a unique Safe Screen for secure crypto transactions. A multi-layered cybersecurity suite provides proactive protection in real-time via a behavioral-based and machine learning Intrusion Prevention System (IPS).

Executive Summary

The company was seeking to reduce the costs of in-house DevOps services for their complex and massive DevOps infrastructure that wasn’t evolving fast enough. It didn’t require support from full-time in-house DevOps. Consequently, we provided the client with the cost-efficient and scalable DevOps as a Service outsourcing model for the maintenance of their CI/CD pipeline. As a result of our involvement and proposed solutions for the improvements in the DevOps area, the client’s overall expenses previously spent on DevOps services were reduced by 80%.

Value Profisea Delivered

To provide our partner with a solution for DevOps cost-efficiency of their CI/CD pipeline, we offered them a flexible and scalable DevOps as a Service outsourcing model. Instead of having a full-time and pricey DevOps position in-house, which didn’t correspond with the client’s agenda, DevOps as a Service model offered the same services but for a lower price and on the Time & Material basis. This approach met all the client’s business and technical goals.

How We Reduced the DevOps Services Costs:

• Being a lean and DevOps outsourcing company, we’ve ensured that there is no waste of time or money for our client – no extra, unnecessary meetings, no bureaucracy – only high-quality Agile services enabled by our professionalism.
• With an individual approach to the client’s needs, we assigned a dedicated technical account manager who collaborated with the client’s tech team and managers to find the best solutions for them. It was a tech-savvy expert that fully understood the client’s requests and spoke the same language.
• Having extensive expertise, we’ve ensured the fastest learning curve possible – within 2 days. Our DevOps experts succeeded in learning the system very quickly and started working with the client’s development team to provide a high-quality DevOps service.
• In 5 days, we assessed and audited our client’s existing enterprise architecture – DevOps, Staging, Production environments, Linux machines, RDS, provisioning by Terraform, Jenkins CI/CD. Even though it was appropriately built – there were still several points for improvements that we outlined suggesting suitable actions to take.
• After the client approved our suggestions, we implemented the appropriate changes in their CI/CD pipeline. All the processes and technologies are well-known to us, so we quickly achieved all the technical goals, establishing ongoing and trustworthy collaboration with our partner.

Our Results

• For 20% of the market price, we provided the same maintenance work, automation of the environment creation, and fast SLA. Our DevOps as a Service outsourcing cooperation model substituted the need to spend more money on the onsite DevOps support.
• Sirin Labs now uses our fast and professional DevOps services on-demand – scaling up and down when needed. They don’t pay for the “idle time” – only for the work done, just as you use computing resources on the Cloud, and enjoy fast and professional service.
• As a result of our partnership, the client’s overall expenses previously spent on DevOps services were reduced by 80%.
• Our engineers are proficient in all up-to-date tools and methodologies. So, we seamlessly coped with the very short knowledge transfer period and started providing the continuous DevOps service in the shortest time possible. Due to this, we’ve avoided delays in the client’s production cycle and losses in their income.
• For over a year now, we keep providing our partner with all the needed prompt support for everything DevOps-related and maintenance for their CI/CD environment. We’re always in touch with their team to offer consultations and advice.

Our partner already had an experience of working with outsourcing software development vendors. However, outsourcing the DevOps services is more sensitive as DevOps experts work with the system’s heart. The whole development lifecycle depends on the DevOps’ professionalism and integrity. Thus, the Sirin Labs reached out to us specifically since they got a warm recommendation from their partners who are also our clients. So, the company was confident in a partnership with Profisea from day one of our work.

BKS is an award-winning software development company that optimizes customers’ training operations with the most comprehensive scheduling, qualification, training, and learning management solutions. Many industry leaders in civil aviation, defense and security, training provision, and compliance training worldwide have successfully implemented Britannica’s customizable training management software called Fox. Their team ensures that the end-customers design, schedule, execute, evaluate, and monitor the training programs with increased operational efficiency, better training delivery, and higher effectiveness and overall performance.

Built on hybrid algorithms and heuristics, Fox optimizes resource allocation and management, maximizes success and ROI. It simplifies complex scheduling tasks and manages the complete lifecycle of qualification and certification training. With Fox, you can also create and deliver course curriculum, define and generate structured/random tests, and ensure continuous monitoring of proficiency and readiness levels. The product also has robust in-built reporting and analytics tools, optimization engine, and mobile evaluation instruments. You can work both online and offline, automatically syncing data from tablets and smartphones.

Executive Summary

Britannica Knowledge Systems is on a journey to migrate from Monolith to an immutable and scalable Microservices architecture over the AWS cloud to meet the market demand. They’ve decided to migrate every element to a new tech stack, fully automate the deployment cycle, and create up-to-date UI. Consequently, Profisea has joined the project to assist with highly professional DevOps services and build the AWS cloud infrastructure for them. Thanks to the DevOps as a Service business model we offered, our client received a one-click deployable, Docker-based distributed architecture built over the AWS environment.

Britannica Knowledge Systems has been awarded a $70 million contract to supply its Fox Training Management System to the U.S. Army as part of the ATIS (Army Training Information System) program. The Fox tool was selected as the enterprise IT platform for U.S. Army education and training programs to increase training efficiency and support force readiness.

Fox will replace over 30 separate systems the Army is currently using and unify Training Management, Training Scheduling, Resource Management, Training Development, and Learning Management capabilities into one comprehensive, integrated environment. Fox, which was tested over a year, will provide a common operating picture and become the authoritative data source for Army training and a single-entry point for all Army training operations. The contract, transacted via the American firm Perspecta, will be implemented over four years.

Partnership in Milestones

BKS is always looking to keep up with the fast pace of innovation and provide its clients with the most customizable, cost-effective, and reliable tech stack. Thus, they needed a reliable and experienced DevOps partner able to build a cloud solution, scalable in the long term. At the same time, BKS was seeking to lower their operational costs and optimize resource management. Therefore, Profisea offered a partnership based on DevOps as a Service business model, which allowed BKS to pay only for the resources they use with no hidden fees or charges.

Our client had to prepare a sophisticated Microsoft technology stack based application for a dockerized approach, so we proposed to handle the transformation iteratively, step by step. BKS had several vital conditions for this project, including cloud platform flexibility, data privacy and compliance, highest security, and easy internal governance.

Profisea’s team started the BKS transformation journey with a thorough analysis of the existing architecture. Considering all the system details and requirements, we suggested AWS as the most suitable IaaS and PaaS solution provider for the client’s business and technical needs. Creating a roadmap for migration, we moved towards building a brand new environment and services using dockers, Kubernetes, and various AWS services.

Value Profisea Delivered

Utilizing reliable and state-of-the-art DevOps and AWS tools, we accelerated the BKS software’s full migration to a fully dockerized solution over the cloud and enabled one-click automated environment creation and upgrade procedures. Our experts also recommended setting up on-demand testing and development Labs over Amazon to develop and test the new architecture in the production look-a-like environment.

Profisea orchestrated the client’s system transitioning in the following stages:

1 Iteration: Assessment , Cloud Architecture Discussion, POC and Cost Evaluation

• We assessed and evaluated the existing architecture to create a migration roadmap.
• We created a Docker-based solution architecture using AWS as an IaaS and PaaS vendor. The solution will be based on Amazon Kubernetes Service (EKS) as a docker orchestration tool. Our expert also suggested a solution using various AWS services like Elasticsearch as a distributed search and analytics engine, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS).
• It was agreed with the client to have all the development and testing departments’ Labs on AWS.
• After designing the infrastructure based on the AWS best practices, our team created a Proof of Concept (PoC) for the client’s distributed Monolithic Windows-based system running on dockers. We wrapped the application in Docker technology with further containerization and orchestration by Kubernetes. PoC showed successful results in performance and functionality testing.
• We estimated the client’s project expenses using an AWS representative’s help to achieve the proposed solution’s optimal costs. The evaluation procedure was put in a continuous ‘planned vs. actual’ mode to always keep track of whether we’re staying within the budget.
• During the entire project, we’ve been continuously comparing costs so that everything was within acceptable limits. If the changes were required, we optimized the environments in-use, right-sized and re-architectured specific area

2 Iteration: One Click environment automated deployment and Upgrade via Terraform and Ansible

• Next, our team built the automated deployment flow using Terraform. Terraform allowed BKS to deploy the whole system over AWS  in one click, enabling the overall deployment cycle to be fast, stable, and easy to maintain.
• Following the customer’s requirements, we added an offline mode to the deployment procedure to work fully offline when needed.
• Using Ansible, we set up full-on support for upgrading the FOX versions in one-click throughout the whole AWS-based system.
• Our DevOps engineer adjusted the existing CI/CD processes to deploy the code on all AWS Labs automatically.
• Using automated environment creation, we established all Dev and Test labs required by BKS engineering department work processes.

Further Milestones

• Set up AWS Kubernetes Service (EKS) as a docker orchestration tool for the FOX system.
• Escort the system-wide evolution to Microservices.

Why Amazon Was the Right Choice

AWS tools were the best choice for the BKS project due to their convenience, flexibility, and ease of use. It suited the client’s production cycle perfectly, providing quick and robust testing options. Our team set up a full range of Amazon Labs to cover the whole product ecosystem: Development, QA, Pre-production, Performance, and Production. While it automated and sped up the deployment cycle, we also made the usage of Labs cost-effective. Based on the need for the resources’ operation time, our team established a ‘waking up — putting to sleep’ procedure for the particular machines.

For companies like BKS, AWS services provide limitless scalability options, allowing their staff to focus only on the core business value. At the same time, its cloud infrastructure runs securely and smoothly in the background. Amazon takes care of the security and compliance standards, leaving the space for the needed growth within the built framework.

Our Results

Throughout the project, we focused only on the client’s business goals and requirements. As a result, BKS got fully flexible and scalable AWS infrastructure for their whole system’s automated deployment. The solution we set up is easy to manage, productive, and highly secure. Profisea’s DevOps as a Service and AWS SaaS models helped the client to stay within their budget, reduce operational expenses, and maintain complete control over the platform to move forward self-sufficiently.

During the project, Profisea provided all the required consultations and support. Along with creating a new cloud architecture for BKS product, we recommended which Amazon services to implement, how to set up a corporate network, security measures, and more. To this day, we continue to escort BKS to their further milestones. We are proud to have been able to add value to our client’s business and help them innovate their product with the AWS cloud resources.