Containerising Creative Culture’s AWS Infrastructure

Who are Creative Culture?

Creative Culture is a marketing and advertising consultancy that specialises in applying cross-cultural insights to business strategy and creativity in order to gain a competitive advantage. With expertise in Transcreation, and Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI), Creative Culture helps businesses navigate the complexities of global markets by leveraging their deep understanding of cultural nuances. Through their project management system, Creative Culture effectively manages and coordinates projects for a diverse range of clients, ensuring that their campaigns resonate with target audiences across different cultures and regions.

Customer Challenge

Creative Culture faced the challenge of running their application server and database on the same EC2 instance, leading to potential performance bottlenecks and scalability issues. As the company’s needs and customer base grew, it became increasingly clear that their existing infrastructure was insufficient to accommodate future growth. In addition, the inherited deployment processes were poorly documented, making it difficult to reliably and safely deploy new features to production. This, in turn, hindered Creative Culture’s ability to respond effectively to the evolving needs of their clients.

To address these challenges, Creative Culture needed to migrate their project management system to a more robust and scalable infrastructure that separated the application server and database into different components. This would provide greater flexibility and performance, as well as enable a smoother deployment process for new features. Moreover, it was crucial for the new infrastructure to incorporate DevOps best practices, ensuring that the development and deployment processes were efficient, reliable, and well-documented.

Why Lambert Labs?

Lambert Labs were chosen to rebuild Creative Culture’s AWS infrastructure because of our experience in deploying containerised Python applications on AWS.

Partner Solution

Lambert Labs was chosen to rebuild Creative Culture’s AWS infrastructure due to their expertise in deploying containerized Python applications on AWS. The team at Lambert Labs started by migrating Creative Culture’s project management system from an EC2-centric stack to an infrastructure that leveraged the best services available from AWS, including Elastic Beanstalk, AWS RDS, Amazon S3, AWS ECR, and AWS ACM.

Using AWS CloudFormation, Lambert Labs templated the entire infrastructure in both staging and production environments. The new infrastructure consisted of a Django application using a load-balanced Docker-based Elastic Beanstalk environment connected to a MySQL database running on AWS RDS. Separate VPCs were set up for staging and production, with the load balancers residing in public subnets and the application and database layers in private subnets. This architecture provided a more reliable, secure, and scalable environment for Creative Culture’s project management system.

To ensure robust release and deployment processes, Lambert Labs integrated GitHub, CircleCI, and AWS CloudFormation. We also conducted an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review to confirm that the created AWS workload adhered to the AWS Well-Architected Framework. This review helped identify and remediate several medium and high-risk issues, further improving the overall performance and reliability of Creative Culture’s project management system.

We now host and maintain the Creative Culture project management system on an ongoing basis and are responsible for the Python/Django application development and the management of the associated AWS infrastructure.

Results and Benefits

The migration to the new AWS infrastructure and the implementation of DevOps best practices resulted in significant improvements for Creative Culture. The updated solution is more reliable, easily redeployable due to being defined by CloudFormation templates, and supports small incremental changes facilitated by the CI/CD pipelines in CircleCI. This transformation in deployment processes enabled Creative Culture to quickly and safely introduce new features to their project management system, ensuring they could better serve their clients’ needs.

The completely automated deployments eliminated the risk of user error, further enhancing the reliability of the system. Creative Culture’s shift from large releases to expecting small, incremental changes transformed their business approach, allowing them to become more agile and responsive in a competitive market. Overall, Lambert Labs’ expertise in AWS and DevOps best practices has significantly improved Creative Culture’s project management system in terms of performance, scalability, and security, empowering the organization to better serve their clients and achieve their goals.

Measurably, the benefits that Lambert Labs delivered include:

  • 100% uptime since the migration.
  • A 50% decrease in the mean response latency to 0.35s.
  • Reduced deployment time to 8 minutes in a completely automated fashion.
  • Improvement of Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objectives to 24 hours and 4 hours respectively.
  • Improved logging and monitoring reduced development team time spent debugging application bugs by 40%

About Lambert Labs

Lambert Labs, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, is a Python and cloud development company based in London. We specialize in providing Python development services, AWS consulting services, and AWS Well-Architected Framework Review services.

We participate in various APN programs, including:

  • AWS Well-Architected Partner Program
  • AWS Reseller
  • AWS CloudFormation Service Validation holder
  • AWS RDS Service Validation holder
  • AWS Public Sector Program
  • AWS Immersion Day Program

Our expertise in AWS technologies and commitment to delivering high-quality solutions have made us a trusted partner for clients seeking reliable and efficient solutions to meet their business objectives.

If you would like to find out a little bit more about Lambert Labs then please feel free to read about our Python development servicesAWS consulting services or AWS Well-Architected Framework Review services.