Executive Summary: Send Photos to Prison

Flikshop keeps families connected to their friends and relatives incarcerated in over 2,000 jails, prisons, and juvenile facilities across the US. Men and women in prison are away from their families; feel left out as they have not seen their loved ones for years. The Flikshop app allows users to send photos and personal messages as real postcards directly to their loved ones; making it possible to share moments instantly, helping families stay connected by sharing bonds and creating a more substantial reentry plan for every person in every facility in the country.

Customer challenge

• The Flikshop app is deployed in AWS EC2 and they have 18 APIs, 3 web services, and 4 worker services. They have deployed all the APIs and services in each EC2.
• The customer wanted a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services that facilitates declarative configuration and automation. They also wanted to secure the important keys which are used in source code.

How ITTStar Helped the Customer:

ITTStar developed, tested, and deployed infrastructure that was configured based on Kubernetes. This was accomplished by utilizing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), as well as Elastic Block Store (EBS), Autoscaling, and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB).

In addition, Amazon Route 53 used; was a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. We had set up self-healing and configured Autoscaling at the Pod level. This ensured minimal downtime for maintenance and upgrades. The new solution also ensured no disruption in services, as well as proactive mitigation of potential demand issues.

Why AWS?

• The client was already on the AWS Cloud platform.
• Initially, the client was using 27 instances for 27 APIs. Later, ITTStar deployed each API as a micro-service and deployed them in the K8s cluster with 5 nodes which reduced the cost to 3/4th of the initial.
• Old deployment was done manually, now ITTStar automated it by using the CI/CD tool (Jenkins). It reduced the deployment time.
• ITTStar configured K8s-lens and Prometheus for monitoring.
• With K8s deployment, there was zero downtime.

Why customers chose ITTStar?

ITTStar has previously worked on many similar implementations and this, combined with our strong skill set around DevOps won us the business. We also won with our dedication and service to the customer, which was very well received and praised.

We won this customer through experience, solid processes, and a strong customer service ethos. We also implemented all the requirements client had asked for and provided them smoother transition to the new platform running in Kubernetes with autoscaling configured and monitoring.

Impact & Result

ITTStar's unique solution transformed Flikshop’s business functioning in the following ways:

• Flexibility - Old deployment was done manually. Now, ITTStar has automated that by using the CI/CD tool (Jenkins). It reduced the deployment time. With K8s deployment, there is zero down time.
• Scalability - With the new solution, we have enabled horizontal Pod autoscaling in Kubernetes.
• Cost Reduction - Initially Client was using 27 instances for 27 APIs, later ITTStar deployed each API as a micro-service and deployed it in K8s cluster with 5 nodes which reduced the cost to 3/4th of the initial.
• Security & Resilience - Instances are running in a private subnet and controlled the network access to the instances. Configured HPA for better resilience