Classified Cloud Adoption

Problem Statement

Blackspoke’s IC customer embraced cloud services early to increase automation and reduce time-to-market. As its cloud strategy matured, the customer realized the initial “lift and shift” approach was not realizing the full benefits of the cloud, including associated cost reductions. The customer tasked Blackspoke with re-hosting a large Content Management System (CMS) using cloud-native technologies to realize the full benefits of cloud-based management and delivery.

Blackspoke Solution

Blackspoke performed an Amazon Web Services Well-Architected Review (WAR) of the CMS application to identify the optimal cloud services for improving the build process and refactoring the application to be cloud-native. Following the WAR, Blackspoke instituted an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) model to script every aspect of the build process (e.g., AMI creation, OS executable/code installation, AWS infrastructure deployment). Blackspoke then decoupled the application data layer from the rest of the application and migrated it to S3 to reduce overall SQL storage footprint and associated costs.

Customer Results

The modernized CMS IaC approach enabled automated application reconstitution in less than 5 hours using Cloud Formation templates (vs. the previous 4-day timeframe for manual reconstitution), provided on-demand builds for test/UAT environments that reduced AWS compute costs by +$25K/month, increased overall performance of the application by 30% using S3, and reduced EBS-related costs by more than $10K. The approach additionally served as a blueprint for future client applications.