Improving and Simplifying Infrastructure Together: the Strategic Partnership between
Teracloud and Axiom Cloud
Executive Summary
Axiom Cloud launched in 2014, under the notion that the last major roadblock to a clean energy future wasn’t cheaper solar panels, wind turbines, or electric vehicles—it was enabling extremely high penetration of intermittent renewable energy onto our electricity grid with load flexibility and energy storage.
Axiom Cloud uses software to automate and transform how the world’s cooling systems are powered, operated, and maintained, to generate significant climate and financial impact.
Since Teracloud started working with Axiom Cloud, their infrastructure’s security, performance, and reliability have improved drastically.
About Axiom Cloud
As mentioned above, Axiom Cloud is on a mission to transform the world's refrigeration systems. Their first product, the Refrigeration Battery® (RB), was developed with the goal of providing the lowest possible cost solution for energy storage. To do this, they turned cloud-based AI software into a standalone IoT platform and launched their first "app", Virtual BatteryTM.
The Virtual Battery app was designed to transform supermarkets’ frozen (food) inventory into a smart thermal energy storage asset, without using expensive lithium-ion batteries. They then developed their second application, Virtual TechnicianTM, to address the maintenance, energy efficiency, and refrigerant management issues plaguing the refrigeration industry.
In early 2021, they launched their third app, Facilities AnalyzerTM, to provide business visibility and analysis for multi-site refrigeration at an entry-level price.
Axiom Cloud's Challenges
As a very fast growing company Axiom Cloud was facing challenges related to their infrastructure’s general governance. They were looking for a partner who could help and support them on:
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Cloud Management
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DevOps
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Infrastructure Architecture and Design
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IaaC
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CICD
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Security
Overall they were looking for a team that could add knowledge and expertise to the existing cloud infrastructure, while also working together on new technology adoption with elasticity capabilities.
Why AWS
Cloud computing is on the rise, and AWS is emerging as the clear winner. With more than 40% market share of the cloud service market, Amazon Web Services is the leader in the industry. It offers cloud-based storage, virtual storage, and 70 other services to enterprises for their digital needs.
COVID-19 has driven companies to explore cloud computing more than ever. Amazon cloud business solutions enable you to move your organization to virtual channels. AWS cloud consulting is becoming popular as enterprises look to analyze how going virtual with AWS will help them reap the benefits of digital technology.
AWS is designed to allow application providers, ISVs, and vendors to quickly and securely host your applications – whether an existing application or a new SaaS-based application. You can use the AWS Management Console or well-documented web services APIs to access AWS’s application hosting platform.
Using AWS tools, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing, your application can scale up or down based on demand. Backed by Amazon’s massive infrastructure, you have access to compute and storage resources when you need them.
Using AWS tools, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing, customer applications can scale up or down based on demand. Backed by Amazon’s massive infrastructure, customers have access to compute and storage resources whenever needed.
Why Teracloud
Teracloud’s expertise in the Cloud deployment, security, and hands-on experience in helping all kinds of companies scale their business in a healthy and efficient manner was crucial in their decision.
Teracloud’s Certified AWS Engineers conducted a comprehensive review of the organization’s existing AWS environment.
With this review, Teracloud produced a report that outlined the company’s current state in regards to the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework and specific technical recommendations for improving their environments.
Teracloud’s team has vast experience in security compliances and good practices.
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APN Advanced partner with certified resources
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Proactive and leadership attitude team
Partner Solution
Based on the assessment we initially proposed to migrate their infrastructure code to Terraform, this was followed by the implementation of monitoring and alerting solutions for their main services, either due to issues with crashes, resource limits, or cost considerations. The focus was set on improving security as well as account management.
The solution includes the implementation of an EKS cluster and bost the platform elasticity leveraging Karpenter for Autoscaling automation, which takes care of both horizontal and vertical auto scaling of the instances that power up the cluster and the use of Fluent Bit to collect specific resource consumption metrics from the cluster.
All customer accounts are managed from within the AWS Organization, which provides a more convenient, efficient, and secure way to configure at the account level.
Following the AWS Well-Architected framework we designed and implemented a solution that included the five pillars. Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance, and Cost-effectiveness.
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Architecture based on containers under AWS EKS
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Continuous Integration and Delivery using CodeBuild and CodePipelines to automate
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Infrastructure as a Code using Terraform
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Secure data stores with AWS RDS deletion protection and encryption enabled.
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Monitoring and visibility enabled by CloudWatch and notifications via slack channel and email.
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Use of AWS Organization to allow management of multiple AWS accounts from a single console, enabling centralized management, cost control, security and compliance, resource sharing, and scalability.
A three-tier VPC (public, private, and database subnets) deployed in two AZs
A VPN server sitting in the public subnet for accessing the VPC from the outside.
Benefits for Axiom Cloud
As seen in the graph above, after implementing the most impactful changes over the last few months, we observed a significant decrease in the monthly cost of all accounts, thus meeting compliance with all AWS pillars.
Next Steps
The steps to follow when contacting the client are:
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Cleaning up unnecessary infrastructure.
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Correcting vulnerability recommendations provided by SecurityHub.
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Properly configuring the EKS cluster.
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Compliance with AWS best practices.
About the Partner
Teracloud is a fast-growing AWS Advanced Consulting Partner company created by certified cloud experts in migrating and deploying startups, enterprises, and everything in between to the cloud.
Our expertise ranges from designing state of the art cloud architecture to deploying and managing cloud environments through Managed Services including AWS Consulting, Architects, DevOps, DevSecOps, MLOps, 24/7 Support, Automation, Disaster Recovery and Security. We provide secure, scalable and highly available solutions for our Cloud Customers.
We have worked for companies from a variety of industries such as airlines, healthcare, education, and e-commerce designing, implementing, and managing Cloud workloads with HA architecture under 99.999% uptime SLA and PCI/HIPAA compliance requirements.