Chief Mechanic Migrated to AWS, leveraging Well-Architected and CloudCare

About The Client

Chief Mechanic is a software company and web hosting business delivering solutions for the automotive sector.

It provides hosting and management for third-party dealership businesses through its proprietary dealership management platform, MotorDesk. 

The Challenge

The MotorDesk platform was being deployed to a third-party cloud hosting provider. However, this provider struggled to maintain a stable, high-performing infrastructure, causing frequent disruptions for Chief Mechanic’s customers.   

The provider could not adequately explain the reasons for this unreliability, resulting in a lack of confidence in its capabilities. As a result, Chief Mechanic decided to migrate its platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

Being new to the platform, the Chief Mechanic team sought the expertise of Devoteam to guide them through the process end-to-end, from discovery to deployment. 

The Solution

Working with Devoteam, Chief Mechanic conducted a comprehensive evaluation of all the infrastructure components necessary for migrating to AWS. This process identified the optimal technologies and services to deploy to achieve a modernised architecture.   

Following the creation of a migration plan, Devoteam conducted a Well-Architected Framework Review to assess and validate the plan, ensuring that the migrated workload would be deployed in AWS in line with best practices defined by the six pillars of the framework. 

With the review findings, Chief Mechanic took advantage of the three cost-neutral remediation days offered by Devoteam as part of the review, the remediation cost being offset by AWS credits. Both teams worked in close collaboration to implement changes across the following pillars: 

Security

• A well-architected VPC with private and public subnets was designed to deploy application components securely. 
• Security services were enabled to ensure compliance with data protection and payment processing regulations. 
• Security groups and AWS Web Application Firewall were planned, configured and deployed to reduce exposure to external threats. 

Cost Optimisaton

• Devoteam ran a cost optimisation workshop to familiarise the Chief Mechanic team with AWS cost monitoring controls and tools. 
• Budgets and budget monitoring were set up to reduce the requirement for manual intervention in cost monitoring. 

Reliability & Operational Excellence

• The provisioning of resources was right-sized and automated to allow the service to respond to variations in demand automatically. 
• Monitoring dashboards and alarms were set up to increase service health visibility. 

Following the remediation of the workload, the Chief Mechanic deployed the production environment in preparation for data migration and DNS update. The in-house team opted to complete the migration, leveraging Devoteam’s CloudCare service to access on-demand technical support from our team of Solutions Architects as needed.

Results

Through partnering with Devoteam, Chief Mechanic has gained a comprehensive understanding of AWS, along with development and validation of its migration proposal from our cloud experts. This support instilled the team with the confidence required to undertake the project.

As a result, Chief Mechanic now has an AWS solution providing not only the service required but also the monitoring, auditing and alerting to ensure a reliable, consistent operation. This in turn substantially reduces the risk of disruptions to customers, crucial for maintaining the reputation of any B2B business. 

Following the Well-Architected Review, Chief Mechanic now has the assurance that best practices are being adhered to, particularly with regards to security. By introducing a well-architected VPC, NAT gateways and Application Load Balancers, the number of servers directly exposed to the internet was reduced by 80%. With AWS Security Hub in place, critical findings were reduced by 90% and high-risk issues by 30% after addressing the root causes and training the technical team on best practice recommendations around account and service security configurations. 

Finally, by signing up for CloudCare, in addition to accessing on-demand advice and technical support from our team through a dedicated channel, Chief Mechanic now receives a discount on its monthly AWS bill and on any future consultancy rates from Devoteam, at no extra cost.