Another Kindly Ops Success Story:
Society of Grownups
Building a financial literacy platform on AWS
Who is Society of Grownups?
Society of Grownups, a financial literacy platform founded in Boston in 2014, believes a solid financial footing makes your personal goals, whatever they may be, a lot more attainable. Education and tools are all designed around the things that matter to you, from advancing your career to building a home, being a good parent to simply finding balance, and everything in between. Content covers critical subjects like investments, debt, and inheritance.
Challenge | Solution | |
The development team was given the challenge of building out a new financial literacy platform and integrating functionality from existing content platforms and financial analysis algorithms. The new platform needed to support services written in multiple languages and using multiple databases. | Using RDS for MySQL and Postgresql made it very easy to set up the needed database systems. Migrating the existing software applications into Autoscaling groups improved uptime and made maintenance much easier. As new applications were written, each one was deployed in an Autoscaling group, simplifying management. | |
For any software that processes customer financial data, security is of utmost importance. Assurance was needed that every aspect of the development and operations processes were secure, and that the software and servers were monitored and updated with the latest security patches. | By using the CloudWatch agent for gathering logs and setting up CloudWatch alerts on the collected logs, continuous monitoring was achieved. AWS CloudTrail provided an additional level of confidence in being able to audit all activities happening in the AWS account. | |
Several development teams were working on new features in parallel, and needed the ability to set up multiple identical testing environments that allowed feature testing to proceed without having to wait for other teams to finish. | The system architecture from network to database to applications was modeled in CloudFormation. This enabled new independent environments to be provisioned rapidly on demand with high confidence that things were set up correctly. | |
The existing deployment process was manual, time-consuming, and error prone. The team needed a way to be able to deploy more reliably, across multiple environments, and more frequently. The whole team was eager to start using a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment solution. | Connecting CodeDeploy to the existing automated test runner enabled continuous delivery of successful application builds to the QA environment. When it came time to promote a set of changes to the production environment, the process was a couple of clicks and a few minutes instead of hours of downtime with many manual steps. |