Xcenter’s Tenets platform is a fully featured online e-sports collaboration tool that enables users to play, organize, and collaborate with players globally.
Despite its innovative offerings, Xcenter faced significant operational and infrastructure challenges that hindered its growth. Its reliance on a legacy hosting provider and manual processes led to inefficiencies, scalability issues, and inconsistent performance.
TekBay, a renowned provider of cloud migration and DevOps solutions, intervened to resolve these limitations. By leveraging AWS and DevOps practices, TekBay re-architected Xcenter’s infrastructure to deliver a scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient solution.
Key Challenges: Infrastructure Bottlenecks and Operational Inefficiencies
Before adopting AWS and DevOps, Xcenter faced several critical challenges affecting its platform’s performance and reliability. These included:
- Limited Hosting Services: The application hosted on DigitalOcean lacked critical features and scalability, restricting growth.
- Scalability Issues: The transcoding service experienced frequent performance bottlenecks during high traffic, leading to downtime.
- Manual Deployment: Java application deployments were labor-intensive, error-prone, and inconsistent.
- Content Delivery Delays: Ineffective CDN configuration led to slow content delivery to global users.
- Mass Email Problems: Inefficient email services hampered communication and customer engagement efforts.
These issues resulted in frequent downtime, suboptimal performance, and a diminished user experience.
TekBay’s Solution: Modernizing Operations with AWS and DevOps Practices
TekBay proposed a comprehensive solution focused on automation, scalability, and efficiency to address these challenges. This strategy employed DevOps practices and AWS tools to rebuild Xcenter’s infrastructure.
Key Components of the Solution
1) CI/CD Pipeline: TekBay implemented a robust CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions for building, testing, and deploying Java and Python services, as well as static websites. This automated process ensured consistency and reduced errors in deployments.
2) Scalable Architecture:
- Auto Scaling Groups: Two Auto Scaling Groups—one for backend services and one for the transcoding service—were deployed to handle traffic surges seamlessly.
- Terraform: Leveraged Terraform as the IaC tool for automating and managing distributed application stacks.
3) Content Delivery: Integrated AWS S3 and CloudFront to serve as the content delivery network (CDN), improving load times for global users.
4) Storage & Monitoring:
- Used Amazon EFS for scalable and reliable video storage.
- Implemented a Grafana stack for real-time monitoring and telemetry data, ensuring proactive issue resolution.
5) Email Communication: Configured Amazon SNS for efficient and reliable mass email delivery.
6) Enhanced Database Management:
- Utilized Amazon RDS for relational data storage.
- Deployed a ScyllaDB 3-node cluster for high-performance handling of unstructured data.
Find Out: How 3Doge, a wallet-based application, leveraged infrastructure automation with Terraform.
What Benefits Did Xcenter Get From the TekBay-led AWS and DevOps Practices Solution?
The re-architecture provided significant benefits, enhancing performance, scalability, and operational efficiency:
1) Streamlined Development and Deployment:
- Automated CI/CD pipelines reduced deployment lead times and improved reliability.
- Deployment frequency increased, enabling faster iterations and updates.
2) Improved Scalability and Performance:
- Auto Scaling Groups with spot instances ensured cost-efficient scaling.
- CloudFront reduced image and video load times by 40%, improving the user experience.
3) Enhanced Observability and Monitoring:
- Real-time monitoring with Grafana improved system reliability
- Scalable logging and telemetry backed by S3 enabled efficient issue resolution.
4) Reliable Communication: Amazon SNS ensured uninterrupted mass email delivery, enhancing customer engagement.
Results
Xcenter’s platform underwent a remarkable transformation, achieving the following outcomes:
1) Deployment Efficiency: The deployment frequency increased by 25%, with changes deployed to production within 8–10 minutes of being committed to the repository.
2) Enhanced Performance: System performance improved by 50%, driven by optimized ScyllaDB clusters and CloudFront CDN integration
3) Increased Reliability:
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) improved by 15%, ensuring greater system stability.
- Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) was reduced by 40%, enabling faster recovery from issues.
4) Cost Optimization: Spot instance usage and optimized scaling reduced hosting costs significantly
5) Improved User Experience: Content delivery load times decreased by 40%, enhancing user satisfaction.
Conclusion
Xcenter’s transition to AWS, guided by TekBay, revolutionized its e-sports collaboration platform.
By adopting DevOps practices, implementing a CI/CD pipeline, and utilizing AWS services such as Auto Scaling Groups, CloudFront, and Terraform, Xcenter achieved unprecedented scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency.
This modernization has enabled Xcenter to accelerate its development cycles, deliver exceptional user experiences, and set the stage for sustained growth in the competitive e-sports industry.
Are you looking to transform your platform with AWS and DevOps? Contact TekBay today for scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient solutions.
