Voice123, Well-Architected

The Challenge

Voice123 was born in 2003 in the United States, as an initiative to alleviate the problems that professional speakers who were trying to enter the Anglo-Saxon market had to face by holding auditions and hiring agents for this purpose. This platform is a free website where people can enter their profile and offer their services. In its first year of operation, 3,000 people from all over the world registered and it established itself as a recognized directory for broadcasters. By 2020, the growth extended to 250,000 international-class broadcasters and buyers.

Due to the growth of the platform, together with the intention to explore new services and implement useful tools that perhaps they had not taken into account when beginning the migration of their infrastructure to the cloud in 2010; It became imperative to review and optimize workloads to guarantee quality, performance and security of the service provided by Voice123 to its users

Strategy and Solution

To address this need, the services of Clouxter for the execution of a Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) on whether to load productively, to identify and mitigate potential risks, and obtain 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.

Of these opportunities, activities distributed in 3 pillars of good architecture practices were prioritized: Security, Reliability and Cost Optimization. The improvement activities of each of the indicated pillars included:

Reliability

• Auto-scaling was implemented for core computing resources (Production).
• Monitoring of resources is established by activating monitoring services (VPC Flow, 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 (saving plan).
• Definition and proposal of a unified mechanism for managing user accounts across 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.
• WAFs were 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.

Benefits

Substantial cost reduction

Despite the provision of the new services, the actions proposed in the remediation plan for the Cost Optimization pillar achieved a reduction of over 25% in the consumption cost that Voice123 had been managing.

Now, Voice123 has more tools to manage, optimize and protect your loads, at a lower total consumption cost.

Security, Tranquility, 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

Thanks to the experience, practices, and recommendations identified during this Well-Architected Review; Voice123 feels capable of implementing substantial improvements to its architectures – current and new – and successfully resolving 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.