About the Project

The Podcast Host Ltd. is a service that allows you to store and distribute podcast audio files through their domain. They make podcast production super quick and easy by taking care of Processing, Editing & Publishing Your Podcast.

The company hosts four podcasts. The one needing our assistance is Alitu. It Automates converting & cleaning up your audio files, joins together all your recordings, adds your music & fades, id3 tags & publish to your host.

Goals of the Project

Easily manageable and predictable infrastructure

Security enhancement

Challenge

The initial request was to help with AWS servers management, their optimization, and improving the uptime. After the high-level tasks decomposition, we concentrated on two main goals: building an easily manageable and predictable infrastructure, security enhancement.

Solution

The Podcast Host Ltd. has its servers and databases on AWS. To reach better manageability, predictability, and security our team developed a solution that included several steps that are listed below.

CI/CD Pipeline Implementation

To make the development and testing processes easier and more predictable we installed and configured Jenkins and test jobs for a development server.

Monitoring and Logging Setup

To ensure proactiveness in troubleshooting we set up Zabbix that is proactively warning the client about the emerging issues. Also, we implemented performance metrics, processes, and servers availability.

Using ELK Stack we configured log collection service and aggregated logs from servers to one centralized storage. It allowed us to simplify the process of sorting and searching for logs in the storage.

Security Enhancement

For reliable remote access with automatic failover, we configured a VPN server using Pritunl.

Configuration Management

As a part of implementing best DevOps practices with Infrastructure as a Code approach, we used Terraform to create all AWS resources and Ansible for configuration. This allowed the client to have a reliable infrastructure configuration store with an audit of changes and an ability to replicate any part on a moment notice.

Also, we configured a discovery service for new EC2 instances and started instances via AutoScaling Group.

Project Results
During our collaboration, we have accomplished hundreds of tasks and consequently made significant changes to The Podcast Host's infrastructure. The main improvements include:
Seamlessness
Proactive troubleshooting as a result of the reliable monitoring system
Better manageability
Easier deployment and testing due to the CI/CD pipeline implementation
Stability
Stable IT infrastructure as a result of all work done on the project
Technologies we use
Clients' Feedback
Colin Gray
CEO at The Podcast Host Ltd.

OpsWorks Co. does a great job. Excellent communication and around-the-clock availability. A pleasure to work with!

Oleksandr Slubsky
CTO&Co-founder at LMS Collaborator

Our team is impressed by the job quality and professional skills level of the engineers at OpsWorks Col. These guys are known to do their job pretty good!

Oleksandr Slubsky
CTO&Co-founder at LMS Collaborator

Our team is impressed by the job quality and professional skills level of the engineers at OpsWorks Col. These guys are known to do their job pretty good!