Results

from high peak workloads

High cycles, and delivery times

to moving fast

With swift and quickly features

tech stack

Used tools & technologies
  • Gitlab CI/CD
  • DevOps
  • Serverless Framework

Our client APS Group has been delivering marketing and communications since 1961. They bring together thinkers, content creators and production experts, to make more possible – empowering brands to talk to their customers in the most relevant and rewarding way. With a heritage built on print management, APS Group is independently owned and employ more than 900 people across the globe. Headquartered in the UK, APS Group also has offices in the US and across mainland Europe.

Challenge

handle with high peak workloads, short cycles, and delivery times.

Customers of APS Group expect a robust infrastructure to handle high peak workloads, short cycles, and delivery times. Marketing needs to vary per customer or campaign and are becoming more modern and savvy. It is less about re-usability and more about “moving fast.” Implementing new features, meeting customer needs swiftly and quickly is the constant challenge.

The project team, in which Team Rockstars IT plays a significant role, decided to select Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides this flexibility and can scale quickly to meet all demands.

solution

AWS pipelines

AWS pipelines include Gitlab CI/CD, Terraform templates (sometimes with custom modules), and reusable modules, to deploy and provide infrastructure and applications. The core component is Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), this is where a sophisticated microservices architecture lands on. DevOps teams select their preferred storage and database systems. They benefit from shared best practices and standard functionalities of the APS Group platform.

Various event-driven processes are deployed using Serverless Framework. Serverless Framework is an AWS tool to deploy serverless applications and infrastructure that can scale instantly and eliminates the heavy lifting of running servers or clusters. Serverless Framework deploys and orchestrates Amazon API Gateway configuration and dozens of AWS Lambda functions.

results

new services can be delivered quickly

New services can be delivered quickly, reusing standard infrastructure and best practices. The platform can scale horizontally infinitely. Although flexibility and time-to market are the highest priority, a nice side effect is that AWS allows for more fine-grained insight into running costs of systems compared to on premise solutions.

“THE IT TEAM HAS A HIGHLY SUPPORTING ROLE FOR THE BUSINESS. THE NEEDS ARE SCALABILITY FOR BUSINESS GROWTH, BUT ALSO FLEXIBILITY AND FUTURE PROOFING, AS WELL AS DEVELOPMENT SPEED.”

Emal Gholzad, IT Rockstar on APS Group’s project team