NowWith Case Study

The Challenge

Nowwith's application was originally built on Heroku, but they faced scalability and availability issues during peak demand due to the limited number of dynos available on Heroku's platform. Moreover, the lack of complete customization made it challenging and time-consuming to add new features, if possible at all.

Additionally, the application had a significant amount of streaming content with network traffic that required better security and observability, which was not readily available on Heroku's platform.

The Solution

To achieve NowWith's organizational and product goals, Foresight's experts designed a cloud-native, serverless, multi-account AWS architecture after an in-depth review of the existing platform. Careful consideration was taken to ensure zero disruptions to their running, production platform.

The new platform was built in parallel to production, with separate accounts set up for logging, shared services, development, testing, and production workload components split up by stages. This increased security by limiting the blast radii of search breaches, provided greater velocity for development teams, and better platform flexibility.

Infrastructure on the platform was deployed through code using Terraform and Github actions. Control Tower was implemented to standardize accounts. FarGate clusters were used to make the platform more scalable and available, with workload features rebuilt using Lambda, Step Functions, Kinesis, SQS, and DynamoDB. Logs were sent to the shared logging account where they were stored on S3. OpenSearch was deployed to detect security issues and report problems sooner, increasing observability and security.

To ensure secure authentication and role-based security, Cognito and AWS SSO were used.

Results

The migration of NowWith to AWS has been well-received, by both the company and end customers. The new platform provides greater scalability and availability than the previous platform, and the blast radius of security breaches have been limited, providing greater security.

The platform is now more flexible, allowing for greater development velocity and new feature deployment. Since infrastructure is now deployed through code using IaC tools, it is much easier to update and maintain.

By moving to AWS, NowWith has also seen significant cost savings. They are no longer limited by the number of dynos that Heroku allows and have more control over their resources. Overall, the migration to AWS has provided NowWith with a more stable and cost-effective platform that can better support their organizational and product goals.