Design Cafe & Rapyder Collaborated to Streamline Application and Manage Infrastructure

AWS Managed Cloud Services Case Study of Design Cafe banner image

8 August 2022

About The Client

Design Case, founded in 2016, is currently a leading start-up firm offering its customers interior design and architectural services. It has designed over 5000 homes nationwide and has been featured in over 30 international design publications. With its head office at Jayanagar, Bengaluru, Design Café has additional branches in cities like Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad, etc.

Design Cafe took its next big step in the business by offering the public to partner with a franchise model, extending its reach even further. It is expanding rapidly across the country and is poised to become India’s most recognized and trusted brand for home interiors.

Industry

Interior design and architecting

Offering

Managed Services

Customer Business Needs:

In 2020, Design Café teamed with Rapyder to implement a cloud-based infrastructure for the first time. It is intended to reduce the use and inconvenience of maintaining physical servers to save money. It currently has 5 applications running, which have to be up 24×7. New applications are in the pipeline and are in progress. As a result, it requires full-time monitoring of their infra and infra support, which Rapyder currently provides.

Solution Approach:

Rapyder is working with Design Cafe to assess its current application and infrastructure landscape and providing managed services 24×7 support concerning security, cost optimization, patch management, scalability, and infrastructure maintenance. 

The Rapyder team maintains around 5 applications running across 8 instances in the production account. These instances power all their applications and utilize the high-speed AWS CDN network for the quick response and reduced latency.

Implementation:

  • Implemented a robust approach for deployments and performed rollbacks and database replication for all the applications.
  •  Route53 is used to host various Domains & Co-Domains handled by Design Cafe and maintain DNS configuration.
  •  Rapyder maintains regular backups using AWS Lifecycle Manager and AWS Backup Service to take AMIs’ & Snapshots. Rapyder policy for backup is 2 daily snapshots with 15 being retained and weekly AMIs’ with 4 being retained.
  •  Certificates are purchased from ACM to keep their websites secure, and these certificates are renewed promptly.
  •  Patch Management is completed for all the instances.
  •  The Rapyder monitoring team consistently monitors all the URLs. The URLs are monitored using the Status Cake tool, which provides uptime and downtime periodically.
  •  Monthly Infrastructure reports are prepared and addressed with improvements and solutions to maintain the overall health of the AWS accounts.
  •  Rapyder follows AWS best practices to maintain Identity and Access Management (IAM) users & roles.
  •  Rapyder manages 2 RDS instances at the moment.
  •  2 ALBs are maintained for both Dev and Prod.
  •  CloudFront is used for all websites, benefiting them from AWS’s high-speed CDN network.
  •  WAF is also set up with AWS-managed rules as per best practices.

Reaping Rewards:

  • Patch Management helped Design Cafe significantly improve the performance of the applications.
  •  Cost Optimization helped Design Cafe in cost savings.
  •  AWS’s operating model helped manage the infrastructure better with less running costs.
  •  The monthly reports helped them identify and take action on unused resources.

AWS Services Used:

API Gateway, CloudFront, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, Config, EC2, ELB, GuardDuty, Lambda, RDS, Route53, SES, SNS, S3, WAF.

Next logical move:

The idea of WAR is explained to the client. Rapyder team will perform a Well Architecture Review to restructure and maintain the overall health of the account in the next few months.