Case Study: AltoStack Help Resolver Group Modernize Their Legacy Platform & Reduce AWS Bill By 55% With Cost Visibility And Optimization

Executive Summary

AltoStack client Resolver Group develops innovative digital platforms that create better outcomes from disputed situations for consumers, businesses and mediators alike. They decided that a Digital Transformation initiative was needed to deliver better customer and employee experiences. We helped the company deliver software and technical innovation with greater speed, agility, and efficiency both internally and for their customers.

About Resolver Group

Resolver Group works in close partnership with businesses and organisations from across a range of sectors. Their innovative and unique platforms lead to improved efficiency around complaint handling, whilst the analytics and insight they provide help to drive better business decisions. This benefits the business, their consumers and the entire market, leading to better outcomes for everyone.

The Challenge

Resolver Group needed their platform scaling so that it could be deployed quickly and securely in various regions around the world in accordance with local statutory requirements. The platform also needed securing so that it was resilient to attack as its exposure grew and so that it conformed to statutory and best practice requirements such as ISO27001 and GDPR.

Finally their platform needed stabilising so that releases didn’t break existing functionality. All were needed to ensure that key security and regulatory standards were met on an ongoing basis, including GDPR, ISO27001, and more.

Why AltoStack

Resolver Group was looking for a partner relationship, instead of just a vendor relationship and wanted to work with someone who could share in their success, rather than just delivering their solution. As an AWS Partner Network Advanced Partner, AltoStack had deep expertise in solving similar problems to those being encountered by Resolver Group.

The Solution

By combining VPC, RDS, Elasticache, EC2, ELB and AutoScaling AltoStack architected a new immutable deployment that would meet the high availability and performance requirements. Adding monitoring tools for better visibility into the performance of the environment and the application and enable us to ensure the smooth operations that Resolver Group required.

One key requirement from Resolver Group was the need for automated software configuration management. By using Terraform, AltoStack fully automated the entire environment, from the underlying network to the auto-scaling configuration which enabled Resolver Group to spin up new environments and deliver the system in any region of the world with a click of a button.

On top of automating the environment, AltoStack also implemented a fully automated build system using Jenkins as the central Continuous Integration server for deploying new environments and building new AMI (Amazon Machine Images) that allows them to frequently release new versions of the code without requiring direct support.

AltoStack also utilised AWS Codebuild and AWS Codepipeline to build Feature specific Docker images for Developer Environments which run on Amazon EKS - Managed Kubernetes Service. This has proven to be very beneficial as the organization has successfully made many code pushes to production, allowing them to run an agile process and constantly improve the service they provide to their customers.

At the start of the project, AltoStack performed a Cloud Health Check which helped identify idle, unused or unattached resources. It also helped with identifying workloads that could benefit from the use of AWS Reserved Instances (RIs) or take advantage of Spot Instances. The findings from the Cloud Health Check in addition to Right Sizing and applying those findings whilst architecting the new platform reduced the monthly spend of Resolver Group by 55%.

Having insights from monitoring tools helped us to fine tune the system and reduce the cost of the infrastructure while providing a much improved performance compared to the original deployment. Processes have been put in place to ensure cost optimization on a continuous basis using custom tools and also AWS Compute Optimizer.

Results and Benefits

The move to a cloud-native DevOps model driven by automation and agility has not only allowed Resolver Group to take full advantage of the cloud, but has also created an organisational change that drives stronger operational outcomes at a lower cost.

The company has achieved significant ROI by avoiding slow, manual and complicated software delivery. In addition, development teams can focus on new business initiatives, rather than spending hours creating environments. AltoStack was able to coach and upskill Resolver Group staff to understand each delivered work package so that it can be re-used with other teams.

AltoStack have been brilliant for us. Having picked up a huge, somewhat fragmented legacy system, they got to grips with it incredibly quickly, taking time to understand the business and development needs, and the solution delivered exceeded our expectations, and the cost savings delivered have already pretty much covered the price of the work. Their support and availability throughout the project has been exceptional, and we've learnt a huge amount from them.

Chris O'Byrne, Director of Technology & Engineering, Resolver Group