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How SupportSages helped a *Private Deemed University save US $3,500/month on hosting charges!

Accredited with the highest possible ‘A++’ grade by NAAC and one of the best universities in India as per NIRF 2024.

The Challenge

The University’s website, with an average of 1,000 concurrent users, and exponentially growing that number to 10,000+ during admission and exam results time, required horizontal scaling to prevent downtime and slow loading times. The main challenges faced during scaling were managing media files, optimising the database, ensuring smooth code deployment, and keeping the FinOps best practices in tact.

High Infra Costs

High spec instance types, manual scaling and poor architecture resulted in high infra costs.

Outdated WordPress Versions

Due to lack of staging environment, University was running an outdated version of WP, in fear of breaking the existing website.

No Failover or Disaster Recovery

The then existed architecture didn’t had resilience and involved manual intervention whenever a downtime occurred.

Problem Analysis

Their initial architecture lacked scalability and ran on high-spec resources. Although hosted on AWS, they weren’t fully leveraging AWS Cloud benefits. They sought to optimize both architecture and costs, a challenge, given their high traffic volume.

The commonly used scalable architecture for WordPress involves using EFS (a shared file system), but in their case, using EFS would increase costs and lead to performance issues. Therefore, we needed a more reliable & scalable way to set up WordPress using our time-tested CloudOps and DevOps best practices & methodologies.

SupportSages' Solution

As an AWS Well-Architected Framework Partner, we reviewed their workload and our team of AWS Certified Solution Architects recommended key architectural modifications focused on performance, security, cost optimization, and reliability. We implemented dynamic scalability for both the database and code, allowing the system to automatically adjust to demand.

By suggesting the right architecture, we simplified the scalability process and introduced CI/CD pipelines for smoother WordPress deployments. We had multiple iterations based on their unique requirements, including CI/CD for WordPress and adding a cache-clearing AWS Lambda.

There’s more to our effort, Do you want to explore our client’s full story?

The process of reviewing and overhauling the architecture took about a month, ensuring everything was optimized for both performance and scalability.

The Architecture led to the solution

As part of the AWS Well-Architected Framework Review program for the university, SupportSages conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the existing architecture. After several iterations, we recommended and implemented a redesigned architecture that not only enhanced performance but also led to significant cost savings. A key aspect of this implementation was the adoption of the HalfAtATime deployment strategy using AWS CodeDeploy for streamlined CI/CD processes.

For the staging environment, we mirrored the production setup but introduced flexibility for developers. Specifically, developers were granted the ability to start and stop the staging environment based on their requirements, ensuring greater control and cost efficiency. Throughout the design process, both cost optimization and robust security were prioritized to align with the university's operational needs.

Server Software Stack

AWS Architecture Stack

And, our solution resulted in...

US $3500

Monthly Savings

Monthly hosting charge has been reduced from US $5,000 to US $1,500.

AWS

Credits Awarded

Monthly hosting charge has been reduced from US $5,000 to US $1,500.

Monthly Hosting Charges (in US$)

Accolades from the University Leadership

As an AWS Well-Architected Review partner for us, SupportSages has truly been a life-changer for us. The engagement helped us achieve 70% reduction in our aws infra costs. With the detail analysis and recommendations provided through zero cost WAR exercise, SupportSages played an important role in maximizing efficiency, cost optimization and scalability!