Managing AWS Environment for Wine-Searcher

Executive Summary

About Client

Managing AWS Environment 

Wine-Searcher is a web search engine that helps find the price and availability of any wine, whiskey, spirit, or beer worldwide. It has been in operation since 1999 and has offices in New Zealand and the UK. They provide an easy-to-use search engine, price comparison tools, an extensive database of wines and spirits, an encyclopedia, and news pages that aim to provide all “wine-finding” needs.

https://www.wine-searcher.com/
Location: New Zealand & UK

Project Background

As part of their plan to launch a full suite of digital products, Wine-Searcher chose AWS as their cloud environment. Strategic resource allocation and cost optimization are critical to ensure a cost-effective operation. Peritos helped as the reliable AWS partner on AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets, like valuable tools for implementing ongoing discounted billing. Furthermore, leveraging reserved instances and spot instances and optimizing usage based on peak hours and demand patterns can result in significant cost savings. Experts from the Peritos team helped regularly monitor and fine-tune the AWS environment based on Winesearcher’s needs, allowing for continuous optimization while adhering to budgetary constraints and maintaining the required scalability and performance for their operations.

Scope & Requirement for Managing AWS Environment

In the 1st Phase of the AWS Environment Setup, implementation was discussed as follows:

  • Manage Billing  
  • Value added services  
  • Handling Complex environments   
  • Multiple AWS invoices   
  • Cost Optimization 
  • Cloud security optimization 

Implementation

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Technology and Architecture of Managing AWS Environment

Furthermore, Read on the key components that defined the Architecture for managing the AWS Environment Setup for Wine-Searcher

Technology/ Services used

We used AWS services and helped them to setup below 

  • Cloud: AWS
  • Organization setup: Control tower 
  • AWS SSO for authentication using existing AzureAD credentials
  • Policies setup: Created AWS service control policies
  • Templates created for using common AWS services 

Security & Compliance:

  • Tagging Policies
  • AWS config for compliance checks
  • NIST compliance 
  • Guardrails
  • Security Hub

Network Architecture 

  • Site to Site VPN Architecture using Transit Gateway
  • Distributed AWS Network Firewall
  • Monitoring with Cloud Watch and VPC flow logs. 

Backup and Recovery

  • Cloud systems and components used followed AWS’s well-architected framework, and the resources were all Multi-zone availability with uptime of 99.99% or more. 

Cost Optimization 

  • Alerts and notifications are configured in the AWS cost 

Code Management, Deployment

  • Cloudformation scripts for creating stack sets and scripts for generating AWS services were handed over to the client  

Challenges in Implementing Managing AWS Environment

  • Collate all accounts together 
  • Understand and agree on how the account would be managed under the distribution model  

Project Completion

Duration of Managing AWS Environment Implementation

1st Sep 2021 to Current

Deliverables for Managing AWS Environment

  1. Collate all accounts under the dsitrubution ECAM model  
  2. Manage billing 
  3. Provide support services as needed 
  4. Ongoing discounted licensing  

Support

  • One month of extended support 
  • A template for Cloud formation stack to create more AWS resources using the available stacks
  • Screen-sharing sessions with demos of how the services and new workloads can be deployed. 

Testimonial

Awaited

Next Phase

We are now looking at the next phase of the project, which involves:

1. Implementing a control tower for the client.  

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