Profisea and Phenome Networks: Enhancing Business with AWS Infrastructure as Code

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Company profile

To produce and operate in the competitive and dynamic agricultural sector, plant breeders continuously need information on the performance of their plants in various environments, seasons, and locations for multiple traits and growing conditions.

Founded in 2008, Phenome Networks is a global leader in data management and analysis for plant research, specializing in plant breeding and variety testing software solutions. The PhenomeOne software platform enables customers worldwide to handle vast volumes of past and current information and implement best agronomic practices.

Partnership goals

As Phenome Networks expanded its business, the vision was to implement a cloud architecture approach that would allow apps and tools to be transferred easily between multiple cloud environments without affecting service.

With separate production, staging, and testing environments, Phenome Networks needed a cloud-agnostic solution to orchestrate AWS infrastructure and guarantee that a feature would work in production after a successful deployment to the testing environment. The developers wanted software that could operate the infrastructure within a couple of minutes. Database backups and the setting up of Unfuddle to track tickets, backlogs, and feature requests were also essential requirements for completion of the infrastructure configuration.

Why Amazon Web Services?

AWS became the obvious solution given that the PhenomeOne software platform was expected to support extremely frequent user operation and data administration, and that the system had to meet the highest security and privacy standards.

AWS offers flexible, dependable, scalable, and user-friendly processing resources, database storage, analytics, networking, development tools, business apps, and content delivery services, all of which can save money and allow engineers to quickly resize capacity to meet changing requirements in dynamic environments. Overall, these capabilities strengthen network performance and reliability and free up time for more important tasks.

Reaching the goals

Profisea, as an AWS Consulting Partner, used its considerable DevOps expertise to build an exceptional Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solution. Profisea’s engineers leveraged Terraform to codify the provisioning of infrastructure onto AWS and enabled this provisioning through automation to eliminate human error. AWS CloudFormation, launched via Jenkins CI, was used to deploy the infrastructure for each customer in separate Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) as follows:

To achieve these goals, Profisea’s DevOps experts:

• designed and implemented well-architected business logic for data operations;
• installed the VPN server in two different Availability Zones to support redundancy;
• set up continuous monitoring, notifications, and constant vulnerability checks for Phenome Networks’ workloads;
• used AWS Certificate Manager to manage certificates and their renewal to avoid unexpected certificate expiration;
• encrypted all traffic in transit via SSL certificates. All data was encrypted by KMS-managed keys with a strong permissions policy and periodic rotation;
• implemented mitigation of exposed credentials based on AWS Lambda functions;
• provided automatic parameter checks for infrastructure creation that did not allow AWS CloudFormation deployment to run if there were any conflicts with existing infrastructures;
• configured the GitHub system with a protected main branch, Pull Request, and a minimum of one approval before merging new code into the main branch.

The solution also ensured the safety of sensitive data via encryption practices allowed by Amazon RDS to tap into MySQL’s sophisticated potential. Profisea’s experts also set up an effective disaster recovery plan and took care of the automated database backup to allow Phenome Networks’ application to be reinstated almost immediately and without human intervention.

Amazon Web Services used in the project: Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, AWS CloudTrail, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon Route 53, AWS CloudWatch, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), AWS Certificate Manager, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS Lambda.

Results

With Profisea’s Infrastructure as Code solution, Phenome Networks gained a hugely scalable, easy-to-configure, cost-effective, secure, and fault-tolerant mechanism to deploy any number of AWS environments in the shortest possible time.

Phenome Networks can now determine the size of resources, depending on the number of the application’s users at any moment, while ensuring that even at peak activity no more than 80% of resources are consumed. In addition, Amazon Route 53 health checks monitor the availability of the application.

The team can test the Phenome application and deploy it in the production environment seamlessly, reducing its time to market. The simplicity of workflows also allows developers to make certain changes to infrastructure without involving the DevOps engineer, which further decreases operational costs.

Profisea: customized cloud solutions to fit your business needs

Profisea simplifies, streamlines, and automates software development processes, accelerating time to market and reducing development costs. Our cloud experts carefully study our customers’ requirements and collaboratively develop tailored cloud solutions that perfectly fit the business needs of each of our customers.

If you are looking for optimized infrastructure and enhanced delivery processes, check out our DevOps as a service page to get more information.