Case Study: J1SIM Cards

Summary

The J1SIM Cards web application is an eCommerce platform that allows users to order phone sim cards, activate, and manage their wireless services. Ordinary Experts worked with J1SIM Cards to create a platform which would allow the reliable deployment and management of their infrastructure and automate the build and release of their application.

Problem

The J1SIM eCommerce platform manages a rapidly growing customer base and needed to rapidly deploy new feature sets in order to remain in its industry position. They requested a reliable pattern for delivering extended features to the platform through a repeatable CI/CD process, placed on top of a flexible and scalable infrastructure.

Proposed Solution

Ordinary Experts worked with J1SIM Cards to develop containerized docker solution utilizing Amazon ECS employed through the use of IaC CloudFormation patterns that make the update and release of new infrastructure stacks quick and reliable. Parameterized CloudFormation templates and Terraform modules provision the components of the J1SIM infrastructure (VPC and related networking, ECS clusters, MySQL Aurora, and application specific configuration) Then, utilizing Bitbucket pipelines and ECR, pipelines were created that listen to specific branches on the repository triggering releases to development and production environments upon code merges to the respective branch. For added reliability CloudWatch alarms monitor the logs and send email alerts within specific condition sets to notify developers and platform administrators to critical conditions.

AWS Services

• CloudFormation
• CloudFront
• CloudWatch
• CodeBuild
• CodeDeploy
• EC2
• ECS
• RDS (MySQL Aurora)
• Route 53
• S3

3rd Party Services

• Kill Bill
• Braintree
• Bitbucket

Results

Through our infrastructure and code pipeline automation we have been able to rapidly deploy environments for both production and preprod workloads. We were able to meet the client’s cost and timeline requirements and are continuing to support J1SIM Cards as they grow their customer base and deploy new and extended feature sets to their application.

Application Architecture