ClearScale Helps StoneEagle Deliver No-Downtime Deployments with AWS

StoneEagle develops innovative digital solutions primarily for the retail automotive industry. After acquiring several new, larger clients, the company wanted to scale its infrastructure without taking on more technical debt. Operating on a hybrid cloud model, StoneEagle decided to move completely to Amazon Web Services (AWS). It recruited ClearScale, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, to plan, design, and implement the refactoring and lateral shift to a new infrastructure. This allowed StoneEagle to continue its focus on other initiatives while optimizing its infrastructure. Since its migration to AWS, StoneEagle can push deployments with zero downtime, remove the burden of database management, and focus employee skill sets on one platform.

StoneEagle is a digital services company that offers solutions to help customers track performance, streamline operations, and generate insights. After years of operating on a hybrid cloud model following acquisitions and mergers, the company wanted to consolidate its infrastructure to one cloud platform for several reasons. A lateral move would reduce its technical debt in the future, allow IT teams to focus their skills on innovating in one environment, and support the scalability the company needed to accommodate bigger clients. With the primary goal of a smooth transition and the least amount of disruption to customers, StoneEagle opted to move fully to AWS with the help of AWS Partner ClearScale, an AWS-exclusive shop holding 11 AWS Competencies.

“We chose to specialize in AWS because it has the greatest breadth of services,” said Pavel Vasilyev, chief technical officer at ClearScale.

ClearScale had the expertise to orchestrate StoneEagle’s complex refactoring, which would involve replacing Clearscale’s services and applications with AWS solutions and moving them to the new infrastructure in a phased approach.

The project was divided into two stages. The first was an audit followed by a test migration of StoneEagle’s email service. From there, ClearScale did further discovery and scoping to assess needed changes, from runbooks and functions to servers, databases, and IT services.

In the second stage, ClearScale identified which AWS solutions and services could replicate what StoneEagle was doing with its previous cloud provider. Because of StoneEagle’s legacy architecture, this was complicated. Parameter stores were hidden in different parts of the code and used in different parts of the applications and deployment pipeline, which meant ClearScale had to consider how to rotate and manage them. Each runbook had to be approached differently, with a separate set of AWS services for each runbook.

“Because of ClearScale’s expertise, we could stay focused on other internal initiatives while they managed implementation,” said Austin Green, technical program manager at StoneEagle.

ClearScale chose services such as AWS Lambda, AWS Batch, and AWS Step Functions to decouple intensive, time-consuming, or complicated processes from StoneEagle’s web stack and gain more throughput—a foundational requirement for StoneEagle’s customers.

ClearScale reworked StoneEagle’s DevOps pipeline, choosing services such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk to optimize functionality where possible. This supported a more streamlined deployment process for time-sensitive updates, some of which had to occur during customers’ peak business hours.

With prepackaged services, StoneEagle is able to deploy more quickly, efficiently, and easily. The company can separately evolve its applications while trying to migrate them, making deployments more consistent. Additionally, the feedback from the abstraction layer between the underlying infrastructure and deployments is more responsive and provides more detail than the one StoneEagle was using with its previous cloud platform.

“With the solutions that ClearScale implemented from AWS, we’ve seen a huge improvement in our infrastructure,” said Scott Toberman, chief architect at StoneEagle. “With AWS Elastic Beanstalk, we can more fully automate our midday deployments and minimize any potential downtime. That ability is going to be very important for our agility going forward.”

The improvements ClearScale helped StoneEagle make to its deployment pipelines have resulted in zero downtime and faster pushes.

ClearScale chose Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database, to host and manage StoneEagle’s documents and session stores and optimize instance sizes to best fit workloads. Because the company moved to managed database services, StoneEagle’s database administrators (DBAs) could focus on higher-value tasks instead of time-consuming maintenance.

“Moving to Amazon RDS will allow us to broaden the management of our data from just a couple of DBAs to include a larger group of operations, architecture, and development resources," Toberman said.

To improve efficiency further, ClearScale helped StoneEagle weave in automation. AWS Glue automatically provisions infrastructure as needed, which also promotes cost savings. By converting functions from the previous cloud provider to AWS Lambda, StoneEagle can automatically customize workflows, offering enhanced functionality compared to the previous solution.

As a result of going all-in on AWS, teams can focus on building their knowledge of AWS-based systems instead of splitting effort between cloud platforms.

“This has increased our ability to find solutions to problems. Before, if there was an issue that touched AWS, some of our team members couldn’t address it. Now, we have additional team members who are more familiar with it, and they can solve problems more effectively,” said Greenfield.

Due to the success StoneEagle has had with AWS, the company has plans for future functionality using Amazon EventBridge and AWS containerization solutions.