AWS Well-Architected Review of American Poolplayers Association’s AWS infrastructure
Background
The American Poolplayers Association (APA), headquartered in Lake Saint Louis, MO, operates a network of franchisees and is the world’s largest amateur pool league. Their main platform is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), leveraging a variety of services including AWS Elastic Beanstalk for application hosting.
Challenge
APA had been facing escalating costs related to their AWS usage. They were also concerned about the reliability and scalability of their AWS Elastic Beanstalk applications and also wanted to improve upon the overall security of their AWS account. These issues prompted APA to seek expert guidance to perform a Well-Architected Review of their AWS infrastructure.
Solution
Lambert Labs, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, was enlisted to conduct this comprehensive review. The review and subsequent remediation work ocused on three main areas: security, reliability, and cost optimisation.
- Security: Lambert Labs initiated the review by conducting a thorough assessment of the APA’s AWS security posture. They identified several areas for improvement and leveraged AWS CloudTrail and AWS Security Hub to strengthen the security of APA’s account. CloudTrail was configured to capture all API activity across all regions, ensuring complete visibility into user and resource activity. AWS Security Hub was utilised to consolidate security alerts and automate compliance checks.
- Reliability and Scalability: the review also highlighted areas where the reliability and scalability of the APA’s Elastic Beanstalk applications could be improved. Lambert Labs implemented several best practices in line with the AWS Well-Architected Framework, including tweaking automatic scaling configuration.
- Cost Optimisation: lastly, Lambert Labs focused on cost optimisation. They identified unused resources, optimised instance sizes, and implemented a comprehensive data lifecycle management strategy, all of which helped to reduce the costs associated with APA’s AWS account.
Results
Following the review and implementation of Lambert Labs’ recommendations, APA noticed significant improvements:
- Cost Reduction: APA’s monthly AWS costs were reduced by 20%, leading to substantial annual savings. This was achieved through a combination of eliminating waste, rightsizing services, and managing data life cycles more effectively.
- Improved Reliability and Scalability: The APA saw improvements in the performance and stability of their Elastic Beanstalk applications, especially during peak load times. The applications became more resilient to issues, and could efficiently scale to meet demand.
- Enhanced Security: The implementation of AWS CloudTrail and AWS Security Hub resulted in a notable enhancement in APA’s security posture. APA now had visibility into all activities in their AWS environment, and could detect and respond to potential security issues much more quickly.
Conclusion
The AWS Well-Architected Review by Lambert Labs improved the APA’s AWS setup. It not only helped APA reduce costs, but also made their AWS Elastic Beanstalk applications more reliable and scalable. The improved security measures gave APA the confidence to continue using AWS as a key component of their IT infrastructure.
Lambert Labs demonstrated that a systematic and comprehensive review of AWS environments can yield significant operational improvements and cost savings. The American Poolplayers Association can now look forward to an efficient, scalable, and secure future with AWS.
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