Streamlining AWS infrastructure for 25% cost savings

The Mission

(we chose to accept it)

The technology team behind the award-winning online coding and design school Treehouse recently embarked upon an extensive audit of their platform code base and cloud infrastructure, with the primary goals of reducing complexity and monthly expenses.

Recognizing the enormity of this task while also needing to balance other ongoing priorities, Treehouse enlisted Test Double to lead the infrastructure audit and overhaul.

Test Double’s assessment provided a clear path for completion. The new recommendation helped the small team more effectively manage the infrastructure while also cutting the ongoing infrastructure cost by approximately 30%—without any loss in capacity.

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The Fix

Treehouse is a large application spanning multiple services; te app lets students create their own cloud-based development environment, among other features. At the project’s onset the infrastructure spanned close to 40 servers and an EKS cluster.

We started by mapping existing infrastructure in order to understand how platform features interoperated. Then we containerized everything and rebuilt from the ground up around an orchestrator. ECS was chosen over EKS to minimize overhead for the team.

All tasks were completed without incurring production downtime.

Finally, we helped the team through regular pairing and training sessions, ensuring they have the knowledge to keep maintaining the new infrastructure after the handoff. That included:

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Trained team on how to work with the infrastructure from a developer perspective

Trained technical lead on Terraform & AWS, plus how to maintain the infrastructure from an ops perspective

Imparted security and resilience principles—including best practices for PRs, logging and restricting operations, automated deployments

CONSULTANTS

Tech & Techniques

AWS (ECS, EKS)
Terraform
Chef
Rails
MySQL

The Results

As a result of our consulting, Treehouse was able to significantly reduce its infrastructure complexity, making it possible for the small team to more effectively maintain and upgrade the infrastructure.

The infrastructure was modernized to make it more secure and resilient, resulting in fewer incidents and helping the team to detect and resolve them faster when they occur.

Capacity was improved and infrastructure cost was reduced. Several automated systems were put in place to make deploying code easier and faster.

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