Voice123, Managed Services

The Challenge

In its first year of operation, 3,000 people from all over the world registered and it established itself as a recognized directory for voice talent. By 2020, the growth extended to more than 250,000 broadcasters and buyers internationally. This high demand accelerated Voice123’s need to boost its capabilities to offer its services online.

Based on this high increase and added to the intention to explore new services and implement useful tools that were not originally considered since the migration of its infrastructure to the cloud in 2010; It becomes imperative to review and optimize workloads to guarantee the quality, appropriate performance and security of the service provided by Voice123 to its clients and users in the sector.

Why Clouxter?

To mitigate this need, Clouxter’s consulting unit was initially hired to carry out a Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) on its critical productive load, to identify and mitigate potential risks, and obtaining an efficient, reliable, secure, and optimized infrastructure, which could support the increase in users on the platform, minimizing the risk of issues and/or incidents.

As a result of the WAFR exercise, important optimization activities were identified and distributed mainly in 3 pillars of good architecture practices: Security, reliability, and cost optimization.

Additionally, and in order to shield this need, it was decided to involve the Managed Services (MS) to be responsible for the operational management of your workload in the cloud, to delegate the management of your infrastructure, and to stabilize your services for your growth.

Solutions

Below, reference is made to how both units (consulting and managed services) combined efforts in two phases (WAFR implementation and workload operation) carrying out a controlled transition to ensure optimal operational management.

1. Consultancy Unit

Implemented different improvement activities on its workload, as a result of the Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) solution, focusing on the following pillars:

Reliability

• Auto-scaling was implemented for the computing resources of its core infrastructure (Production).
• Resource monitoring is established by activating services such as VPC Flow and Cloudtrail.
• Recommendations of DRP strategies (scopes and benefits) for their implementation are delivered and discussed; The RTO and RPO were defined.

Cost Optimization

• Definition of a monitoring scheme for resource utilization and capacity.
• Proposal for the implementation of a pricing model to reduce costs (savings plan).
• Definition and proposal of a unified mechanism for the management of user accounts throughout their accounts. (AWS SSO).
• Defining a labeling scheme and configuring cost explorer services.

Security

• Improve the management of user credentials and authentication; in addition to efficiently controlling programmatic access.
• Improve investigative detection of security events by activating GuardDuty, Cloudtrail, and AWS VPC Flow services.
• The WAFs service was implemented in production and Sandbox accounts, to improve network protections.
• Additionally, the protection of data at rest is reinforced through the application of AWS Config rules and AWS KMS.

2. Managed Services Unit

Comprehensive operational management is enabled with 7×24 Monitoring, timely support from cloud specialists, and advanced Administration dedicated to cost and capacity optimization, which combined achieved a reduction in the average number of incidents and service requests. services achieving remarkable stability.

It was possible to maintain the average monthly cost consumption on AWS services in a sustained manner and during the following months of services, exceeding the year with stable costs.

Periodic service reviews (Service Reviews) were carried out, which allowed optimizing the management and relationship between both teams (Voice123 and Clouxter), as well as identifying new resilience opportunities by offering recommendations for Disaster Recovery scenarios.

Results and Benefits

Substantial cost reduction

Despite the provision of new services, the actions proposed in the remediation plan for the cost optimization pillar achieved a reduction of more than 25% on the consumption of AWS services that it was initially managing. Now Voice123 has more tools to manage, optimize and protect your loads, at a lower total consumption cost.

Security

Security is one of the great benefits obtained during this WAR; Voice123 now has many more tools that allow them to detect intrusions, identify vulnerabilities, and mitigate any risks they may encounter.

The logging, alerts, and monitoring system was substantially improved; which allows Voice123 to make decisions at the right times and address potential risks.

Stability and Confidence in the availability of your loads

Additionally, the exhaustive review, improvement, and configuration of the services guarantee the security of the platform.

Strategies were jointly defined to guarantee and support component failures, improve the adaptability of demand changes, and efficiently manage disaster scenarios and/or interruption events.

All this through the applicability of elasticity in core loads; and that is adjusted depending on the needs of the infrastructure. In addition to the definition and delivery of documented and actionable recommendations on disaster recovery plans.

Long term value

Due to the knowledge gained through the practices and recommendations identified during this Well-Architected Review (WAR); Voice123 feels able to implement substantial improvements to its current and future architectures, as well as reliably mitigate risks.

About Voice123

Voice123.com is the most important website to offer and find online voice and locution services in any language and anywhere in the world. With the largest database of voice talent and numerous job opportunities posted daily, Voice123 helps voice talent and voice talent promote their services, as well as any company find the right voice for their projects. With a young, highly qualified and technology-oriented work team, Voice123 seeks to provide an innovative service and be a world-class technology company.

About Clouxter

At Clouxter we enable the adoption path and consolidate the cloud in organizations. Our focus is on DevOps, Migration, Security, and Analytics, providing the key pieces to have a great Cloud strategy. We have extensive experience in different industries such as Banking, Media, Fintech, Public Sector, ISVs, and Startups.

We accompany organizations on this path and accelerate their adoption curve, covering the Definition, Planning, Implementation, and Operations of their solutions, through our Professional Consulting Services, Managed Services, and Local Billing.