Success Story
Innovating legacy systems of an educational streaming service for lawyers.
BUSINESS SUMMARY
Creating New Growth By Removing Old Tech
Lawline provides streamable educational programs for lawyers. With the hectic lives that attorneys lead, they need every minute of their day to count. This means a service dedicated to their continuing education has to be as consistent and on-point as they are and meet the requirements of state and national board certifications. Otherwise, those customers won’t stick around for long.
KEY TAKEAWAY
Eliminated regular service outages and got uptime in the “5 9’s” (99.999%)
Fully automated the dev team’s deployment process to reduce time to market
TECH USED
Amazon AWS utilizing RDS, SQS, SNS, EC2, VPC, Cloudfront, S3, SSM, Jenkins, CloudFormation, Ansible, AWS CodeDisplay
“I can’t tell you how many mornings we’d wake up to a series of angry customer emails because the site went out. All the time and energy trying to keep the servers from falling over kept us from focusing on critical updates to the product.”
– David Schnurman CEO, Lawline
THE CHALLENGE
We Put Their Whole System On Trial
Despite having created a cutting edge SaaS product that delivers well-crafted educational content, Lawline’s supporting infrastructure was a major weak point. The entire system was supported by a co-located setup using rented servers to host their e-commerce platform.
The antiquated deployment created a self-feeding point of failure: to keep the cumbersome setup running well would require a full time systems engineer, but the server setup itself was so expensive they couldn’t afford to hire such a person.
The lack of hardware failover and load balancing, created uptime and reliability issues that were frustrating the internal team and driving away customers.
THE SOLUTION
It Was Time To Get Out Of Server Prison
The first step in working together, was to deploy a fully redundant solution using Amazon’s AWS. We worked with the development team to utilize a number of AWS services to improve the application’s reliability without adding technical overhead. These services included: RDS, SQS, SNS, EC2, SSM, ElastiCache, ElasticSearch, CloudWatch, Cloudfront and SSM.
Then we focused on making the development team’s life happier and more efficient by implementing automated deployments and site maintenance.
Finally, to make sure everything was staying in peak form, we set up easy to use monitoring services so there was full transparency for the team around uptime and performance.
– David Peterka, Petabloc
PROJECT RESULTS
The Final Verdict
Terabytes of video are now streamed to clients every month with consistent up time at a coveted “5 9’s” (99.999%) consistency, and significantly lower maintenance costs.
The development team has renewed confidence and reduced stress as they develop and deploy code updates with a system that’s always up to date. Updates to core software, including a full re-write of the software, are now possible with relatively little, if any, impact. Code releases are fully automated and developers are able to quickly revert code, if required, just as easily.
Ready to learn more?
Set up a free consultation with our team to see how we can work together.