Oblivion B.V. - Meester van Rhemenslaan 3

Their challenge.

It is common knowledge that in order to succeed in the marketplace an app needs to have a strong foundation and be committed to constantly delivering a great experience. When it comes to Bizcuit the “great experience” part is clear. They offer amazing functionalities in an intuitive and fast way. To do so, they count with an outstanding Dev team and rely on the AWS Cloud to host and deliver their product, which offers the ideal technical conditions, flexibility and scalability. “Strong foundation” checked!

But having the Cloud as your playground can be overwhelming. Which services should be used? In what way should they be combined to avoid pitfalls like “Our scalability is great, but our cost has increased…”. And how to apply the necessary changes to maintain and improve the UX without compromising on availability, security and performance?

In face of these challenges, Bizcuit decided to keep focus on the app and leverage Oblivion expertise on AWS to make their journey easier.

They simply asked, “How can we optimize our environment to better serve 
our customers by meeting and keeping the highest security and compliance standards like GDPR and PSD2?”

The solution.

Given Bizcuit’s industry expertise and its team development skills, we decided that the best approach to help them was to deliver a “Well Architected Review.” Based on the Well Architected Framework, the review is a way to benchmark cloud-based application stacks against AWS Best Practices outlined in the framework. Once performed and assessed, an official report and presentation containing all the findings has been delivered.

As an accredited AWS Well Architected Partner, Oblivion not only reviews the environment, but also recommends and deploy optimizations.

After reviewing Bizcuit’s AWS workloads, our consultants and engineers discussed the findings in an onsite meeting with the appropriate stakeholders, making sure to present them in a realistic way and discuss their severity in the context of the customer environment.

We were able to identify 25 relevant improvements that could be addressed and defined an action plan. To get stakeholders on board and make the findings relatable to the real world, our consultants, together with Bizcuit’s IT team, mapped the findings against the company’s business goals and presented a two-phase remediation/recommendation plan. The approval came almost immediately.

The result.

Bizcuit is now operating in a well architected AWS environment. Within 3 months the plan was fully executed. During the first phase, we addressed all security related findings and the ones classified as “critical”, leaving the second phase for tackling the reminder of the findings and implementing the approved recommendations.

All resources are written as Infra-as-code in AWS CloudFormation Templates that now allow for fast RTO. Workloads running on Elastic Container Service based on Amazon EC2 were migrated to AWS Fargate and now are fully managed on a higher level. We leveraged AWS Key Management Service, AWS Systems Manager and AWS Secrets Manager to guarantee and enhance security measures.

Amazon RDS is used for databases and AWS Lambda is used to act based on AWS Configuration rules to maintain compliance. Lastly, to support the fast pace of change the app demands the CI/CD is now powered by AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodePipeline.

Throughout the whole process the Oblivion team managed to meet the requirement of keeping operations uninterrupted while working on the production environment and sharing knowledge, thus enabling the Bizcuit team to get a deep understanding in the findings addressed and recommendations implemented.