Rawnet specialise in crafting digital solutions including platforms to promote business and digital engagement.
With most of its internal skill focussed on product creation and management, Rawnet decided it was time to engage a partner to focus on more general infrastructure provisioning and management, to remove associated business as usual dependencies from its team. Given its existing relationship, coupled with their mature partner status, it was an obvious choice to partner with Softcat.
The Challenge
Like all organisations, a primary channel for user/customer engagement is web. For Rawnet, who specialise in web based product design and engineering, the underlying infrastructure platform management was taking time away from its core focus.
With the majority of its web products already deployed on AWS, and with it as the preferred infrastructure platform, it made logical sense to engage an approved AWS partner to assume this responsibility while also identifying improvements that could be made to streamline the deployment and management process.
With its existing partnership, the Softcat team were engaged and moved quickly to provide advice and expertise to help Rawnet explore how a managed service would integrate with its teams and deliver the required 24x7x365 skills.
Critical Success Factors
- Scalable AWS expertise
- Guidance on how to efficiently evolve the use of AWS including code deployment pipelines
- Incrementally evolve the platform
The Solution
With the objective clear, the engagement was similar to many other Softcat projects and thus highly repeatable – the key to not introducing lots of additional cost or delays.
The Softcat team, including project manager, lead site reliability engineer and Architect, started by assessing the current state of AWS platform and identifying the areas where we could improve it (security, architecture, reliability, cost).
Some typical minor changes were identified, such as removal of unused resources, from where onboarding into the managed service was completed. In addition, a key piece of work was undertaken to provide a more future proof process/mechanism for automated deployment of the infrastructure (CICD) tightly coupled with the web product code development and release process.
Softcat’s management of the platform ensures automation and reliability by leveraging aspects such as Terraform ssfor Infrastructure as Code, with GitHub to automate deployment workflow through a series of CI/CD pipelines leveraging a range of AWS native services including AWS Systems Manager, AWS Backup, AWS Lambda, and CloudWatch. This provides the optimum blend of scalable service support coupled with cloud native services.
Highlights
- 24x7x365 Support from Softcat’s AWS engineering (SRE) team
- Seamless onboarding into Softcat support
- Blended of Softcat shared service automation (CI/CD) in conjunction with AWS native services
The Benefits
The primary benefit is Softcat’s proactive PlatformOps to ensure that Rawnet’s AWS hosted digital product remains cost effective, secure and reliable. Associated benefits include:
· A highly automated and standardised AWS platform, with a Softcat 24x7x365 managed service for PlatformOps, to ensure continuous governance (architecture, commercial, security and reliability).
· The Softcat Cloud Management Platform to provide end-to-end visibility of the Rawnet AWS platform
· Adoption of Softcat standards for technology and process improvements enhanced the performance, resilience, and security of the AWS platform.