Cheppers migrated United Way’s websites to AWS
United Way Online is a Drupal based portal hosted on a third party managed web hosting environment. It uses MySQL as a database backend with static content stored on a network file system. Cheppers delivered a highly available, fault tolerant, auto-scaling cloud infrastructure to host the websites with high performance and optimized costs.
Introduction
United Way is an international network of over 1,800 local nonprofit fundraising affiliates. United Way was the largest nonprofit organization in the United States by donations from the public, prior to 2016.
United Way Online is described as a portal to “share ideas, find resources, learn from others around our worldwide network, and help strengthen communities around the world”.
Cheppers has been about creating something awesome since 2012—whether it’s building websites that perfectly balance aesthetics and functionality or highly available cloud-based services at scale. We strive to understand our clients, and build real, longer lasting partnerships with our team.
Cheppers is known as a very technical shop numbering over 70 full-time employees working with more than 25 different technologies.
Initial project status
United Way Online is a Drupal based portal hosted on a third party managed web hosting environment. It uses MySQL as a database backend with static content stored on a network file system.
Key challenges
- Third party integrations - The sites communicates with a multitude of external systems.
- No operational metrics available, making it difficult to predict the required resources.
- Aging web stack - Drupal’s monolithic nature makes it challenging to scale in a cloud environment.
- Continuous operation and development required us to build a CI/CD pipeline for the project.
Implementation highlights
Cheppers delivered a highly available, fault tolerant, auto-scaling cloud infrastructure to host the websites with high performance and optimized costs.
Results
- Migrating to managed instances improved maintainability
- Easy automated autoscaling via EC2 Auto Scaling based on CloudWatch metrics
- Improved security with AWS Web Application Firewall v2
- Improved service monitoring
- Reduced response time by infrastructure and Drupal optimizations
Technologies used
- AWS: Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, Auto Scaling, Load Balancing, RDS Aurora, ElastiCache, Elastic File System, S3, CloudFront, CloudWatch, WAF v2,
- PHP, Drupal
- Github Actions
- Terraform
- nginx, php-fpm
