About the client

The client is a company that has a rapidly growing Real Estate product in its portfolio. This product brings together transaction participants and allows them to quickly and easily access transaction details, engage with other parties and share the documents required for proper transaction completion.

Challenge

The client faced the need to automate multi-environment continuous integration and deployment process of microservices, move the front-end part to CDN as well as deploy multi-environment infrastructure as a code.

Solution

1. Amazon Route 53 provides DNS configuration.
2. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that protects the Real Estate platform against common web exploits.
3. Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) that speeds up distribution of static and dynamic web content.
4. Elastic Load Balancing (Application Load Balancer) distributes across the AWS Auto Scaling group of the Real Estate platform instances (Amazon ECS Cluster) in multiple Availability Zones.
5. On Amazon ECS Cluster, there is a dockerized application that consists of the Real Estate platform code itself, Nginx webserver and PHP, etc.
6. Amazon Elasticsearch Service manages Elastic Search Service for Real Estate platform catalog search.
7. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis provides a caching layer for the database.
8. The use of Amazon Aurora or Amazon RDS allows to simplify database administration (including high availability and multi-master configuration).

High-level solution diagram

The solution also features a CI/CD environment that uses GitLab CI to automate deployment and release processes. CI/CD consists of two independent pipelines for the front-end and back-end parts. All secrets for the deployment process are stored securely in GitLab CI. All infrastructure is deployed via Terraform. It’s also used to deploy back-end microservices with GitLab pipelines. State files for Terraform are stored in AWS S3 so they can be easily accessible from local and CI environments.

For the front-end part, a CDN service was configured using AWS CloudFront. The front-end pipeline deploys changes to S3 and then updates content on CloudFront. Both pipelines are triggered automatically and deploy changes to different environments.

High-level infrastructure deployment diagram

Technologies

Terraform, AWS, GitLab CI, Amazon ECS, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS, Amazon EFS, Amazon Route 53, AWS WAF, Elastic Load Balancing.

Result

With the delivered solution, the client has got a highly available and resilient to failures microservice architecture powered by AWS ECS with CloudFront and a fully managed and automated deployment process powered by GitLab CI.