Well-Architected Review of UMA’s Cloud Environment

About UMA

UMA (Unify, Manage, Assist) is a PropTech business founded in Halifax, Yorkshire, United Kingdom. They now have teams based in Belfast, London, Washington DC and Tel Aviv.

UMA’s mission focus was developed in response to the need for workplaces and campuses to innovate and digitally transform to improve user experiences, collaboration, reduce real estate costs and carbon footprint. Their open platform allows the connection of existing workplace technology such as audio-visual and video collaboration equipment and Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to provide additional data sources such as Air Quality and energy management linked to occupancy.

The Challenge

UMA’s platform has been built from the ground-up to be Cloud-native, embracing Cloud best-practice design principals such as micro-service architecture, serverless technologies, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code to develop a secure, resilient and scalable platform for their Customers. UMA engaged Ubertas Consulting, an Advanced AWS Consulting Partner and Well-Architected Framework Program Partner, because they wished to advance their platform even further.

The Solution

Following an initial Well-Architected Review of UMA’s Cloud environment, Ubertas Consulting worked closely with UMA’s DevOps Team to enable them to adopt more Cloud-native practices within their application; the two teams worked collaboratively to understand where the greatest benefit could be sought technically, whilst ensuring that all design decisions were cost optimised.

The Benefits

As a result of their engagement with Ubertas Consulting, UMA were able to:

• Migrate from PostgreSQL to Amazon Aurora, a Cloud-native database engine, which provides higher like-for-like throughput, increased scalability, asynchronous crash recovery, improved fail- over times, and increased data durability – all improving the resilience of UMA’s service further for their Customers.
• Understand how to adopt Cloud-native queueing systems within their application architecture, enabling them to improve resilience whilst reducing their queuing infrastructure costs by over 98%.
• Enhance their proactive response capabilities using real-time metrics and log data, whilst optimising their monthly expenditure in these areas for maximum cost efficiency.

“We were looking for a partner to work with to assist with best practices within our AWS Environment, Devoteam made the process simple from day one.”

Dean O’Meara,Solutions Architect at UMA