American Security is one of the largest providers of connected safes to both consumers and small businesses. Their CashWizard online portal enables their customers to modify safe configurations and view a wide variety of reports to track and audit user activity with a safe.
“Protagona has been great to work with. They quickly understood our technical needs, resources capabilities and adapted to them. Throughout the engagement communication and transparency has been key in keeping the project moving forward. I particularly appreciate their ability to help bridge the understanding of the non-technical individuals.” – Mara Ghisani
Challenge
As their customer base grew, the number of requests and the amount of data being sent to the CashWizard platform increased exponentially. After maximizing efficiencies within the current architecture, American Security realized that they needed to take a different approach to accommodate the expected growth of their platform. They engaged Protagona to understand the current challenges related to scalability and design an architecture to meet their current and future business objectives.
Solution
Protagona quickly identified a series of batch processes that had reached their limits from a scalability perspective. The team designed an event-based architecture that leveraged AWS services like Lambda and SQS to stream events from each safe into the CashWizard platform.
Protagona recognized that to make this vision a reality, fast and safe iteration were paramount.
Leaning heavily on AWS CodeSuite, Protagona implemented a Git-based CI/CD workflow that, along with Terraform, enabled managing both infrastructure and application code quick, safe, and seamless.
Tech Stack
- AWS VPC
- AWS EC2
- AWS Lambda
- AWS S3
- AWS SQS
- AWS DynamoDB
- AWS API Gateway
- AWS CodePipeline
- AWS CodeCommit
- AWS Elastic Cache
- Terraform
Outcome
Reliability
Introducing a Git-based CI/CD workflow, enabled American Security to iterate through workload changes faster. The introduction of pre & post commit testing increased AmSec’s confidence and reduced the number of defects identified in the production environment.
Observability
Leveraging the seamless integration between CloudWatch, X-Ray and native AWS services, provided American Security with a full picture of their operational health and performance trends.
Environment Parity
The deployment and configuration for all components of the serverless architecture are fully automated. All changes are run through a multi-stage CI/CD pipeline that provides consistent deployments to each environment, ensuring a higher level of confidence when testing new features in lower environments.