- Case Study -
Optimizing and Future-Proofing
a Business-Critical Application
About Kaman Automation
Kaman Automation has a well-respected history delivering highly-engineered systems and components that improve precision and increase productivity for original equipment manufacturers and industrial end users.
Mindex optimized the cloud infrastructure for multiple environments, decreasing Kaman Automation’s monthly spend on AWS service costs by 44%!
With a back-office cloud application critical to their key business functions, Kaman Automation knew maintaining security, high availability, and performance of their application was paramount for their continued success providing value to their customers.
Kaman Automation sought out Mindex, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, to future-proof, optimize, and provide on-going support of their business critical application.
Opportunity
- A lack of historical documentation of the application’s original build created knowledge gaps and risk for both internal staff and external vendors.
- Recent application modernization efforts (from EC2 to ECS) by a previous cloud service provider had dramatically increased the cost of AWS services.
- Unavailability or hindered performance of Kaman Automation’s application would negatively impact daily processes, but antiquated code could hinder future enhancements and bug fixes.
“The Mindex team has been great! It’s refreshing to see a team with the core values that I grew up with in my IT career. They are professional, honest and extremely competent!”
Brian Peters
Senior Project Leader
★★★★★
Solution
• An application discovery effort established a baseline of the current state of Kaman Automation’s software design and architecture.
• Current cloud implementation, infrastructure, and database utilization metrics were reviewed for cost optimization opportunities. The Mindex cloud team discovered:
• Current cloud implementation, infrastructure, and database utilization metrics were reviewed for cost optimization opportunities. The Mindex cloud team discovered:
• An over-provisioned development environment needed to be scaled back for its intended purpose.
• Kaman Automation’s production environment was not right-sized within the new containerized configuration.
• Code library upgrades were needed to bring the application up to current standards and mitigate future risk.
Successes
- Living documentation of the application’s architecture will increase team efficiency and reduce Kaman Automation’s dependence on vendors for support they can achieve internally.
- Optimizing the cloud infrastructure reduced monthly AWS consumption-based costs exponentially, without impacting application stability and performance.
This included retiring over a 1/3 of deprecated containerized services in both the pre-production and production environments.
- On-going application enhancements and bug fixes can be easily supported, ensuring an uninterrupted end-user experience with their application.
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