IUCN – International Union for Conservation of Nature – is a membership Union composed of both government and civil society organisations.
IUCN helps the world by finding pragmatic solutions to our most pressing environment and development challenges. It supports scientific research, manages field projects all over the world and brings governments, non-government organizations, United Nations agencies, companies and local communities together to develop and implement policy, laws and best practices.
One of the biggest channels for disseminating our client’s service is their website, so the main concern is to keep it always active and available.
In order to gain efficiencies, increase scalability and security and improve support, IUCN aimed to migrate its website to one of the main cloud providers.
APPROACH & SOLUTION
After analyzing the current architecture and infrastructure, our Cloud & DevOps team together with the Client decided that the best option would be a Google Cloud Solution, based on the migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
The general process consisted of planning the architecture, creating the infrastructure using Google Cloud Platform’s services and preparing the migration process for making the services and data available in the new infrastructure, including steps like orchestrating a service freeze, backing up the current data and shifting the domain to the new site.
The customer’s short-term need was to guarantee the security of their website and, in the long-term, to have scalability and elasticity of service. It was with this focus that our team sought to create a secure, scalable and resilient solution:
CHANGE IN ARCHITECTURE
Change from a monolithic system to a 3-tier architecture, separating the following layers: presentation, application (Drupal) and data;
DEVELOPMENT OF A CACHING STRATEGY
Development of a caching strategy, introducing of new components in the architecture of the website – a CDN and an HTTP accelerator, Varnish – to improve service response times, block unwanted agents and create a mitigation plan;
HORIZONTAL SCALABILITY
Horizontal scalability of the system through the managed instance group service, increasing and decreasing the resources according to their usage;
IMPLEMENTATION OF A GLOBAL LOAD BALANCER
Implementation of a Global Load Balancer, one of the biggest differentiators of GCP compared to other Cloud Providers, to limit and distribute the appropriate volume of requests.
The solution developed by BOLD part of Devoteam has enabled the improvement and betterment of several aspects of the institution, such as:
- Security: make the system more robust by the implementation of blocking systems
- Scalability: scalability of the system to meet changing demand
- Resilience: improvement of performance, agility and operational resilience;
- 24-hour availability: greater effectiveness and efficiency in responding to possible constraints.
Currently, BOLD’s Cloud & DevOps team continues to ensure the permanent availability of the site through a Managed Services service.
- Industry: International Organisation
- Location: Switzerland
- Offer: Cloud Enabed Company
- Value Proposition: Managed Services
- Technology: GCP