About Rise Interactive
Rise Interactive is a Chicago-based digital marketing agency specializing in media, analytics, and customer experience. The agency helps marketing leaders make smarter investment decisions, grounded in data insights. Rise works with enterprise-level brands across all channels of digital marketing. An award-winning agency, Rise is a recognized leader in the marketing space and has received industry recognition for explosive growth, excellence in digital marketing, and company culture.
The Challenge
Rise Interactive provides a proprietary personalization solution that utilizes machine learning and cross-channel data integration to help its clients connect with their customers. The solution provides recommendations for targeted and personalized messaging.
With their existing infrastructure, Rise Interactive wanted support migrating to a different data center infrastructure.
“Building and running a data product in the marketing domain requires a lot of infrastructure agility. Our existing system was taking too long to launch and scale clustered compute resources. The migration to AWS revolutionized our real-time event analytics and personalization technology and enabled Rise to keep up with client and product demand.” Director of Data Science & Engineering – Eric Sherlock.
Rise Interactive knew that in addition to performance gains, a more modern infrastructure would allow them to increase cost efficiencies and leverage more DevOps automation principles.
Rise Interactive sought a support solution to act as an extension of their team to migrate their current platform into a new AWS infrastructure. The agency selected the Six Nines team due to their extensive experience as an AWS Advanced Consulting partner and their DevOps Automation expertise.
Why Amazon Web Services
The core of Rise Interactives infrastructure is Amazon EC2 instances in an Amazon VPC utilizing Advanced Networking features and utilizing Amazon’s Object Storage product Amazon S3. Beyond the compute, networking and storage platform, Six Nines deployed their Cassandra, Spark, and Kafka based solution to take advantage of Amazon EMR as well as Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Kinesis.
For their core DevOps capabilities, Six Nines used AWS CloudFormation and Ansible Templates to define the DevOps framework and allow Amazon EMR clusters to be spun up as needed in a timely fashion.
The Benefits
As part of their standard Cloud Adoption product, Six Nines conducted a discovery workshop to understand Rise Interactive’s objectives.
“We dig deep to understand the flow of data to both validate the current design and understand how to iterate and optimize it”, says Eric Terrell, Director of Sales and Solutions at Six Nines. “Implementing a resilient, ephemeral environment is a joint effort to establish the right dataflow and meet a client's business needs.”
The Six Nines Engineering Team performed validation of all the system builds with AWS CloudFormation templates, including the foundational software defined infrastructure and servers. We then took the build guides Rise Interactive provided and turned them into Ansible playbooks to configure Kafka, Cassandra, and other system components.
Benefits of using an expert:
Experience, Automation, and Tooling
- Reference Architecture: Six Nines approaches customer engagements with a reference architecture, based on best practices and experience from over 9 years of AWS migrations.
- Infrastructure automation: Infrastructure is defined and assembled into AWS CloudFormation templates, where it can be easily versioned and replicated for future deployments.
- Deployment automation: The customer's code deployment process is integrated with cloud-native tools like Ansible, improving both deployment velocity and reducing manual errors.
- Self-healing, auto-correcting, and self-monitoring: The right monitoring tools and configuration management scripts catch and resolve anomalies or misconfigured resources.
Operational Efficiency
- Cost Management: To help our customers eliminate the challenges with manual tracking of expenses and chargebacks as well as provide actionable reporting and resource management, Six Nines uses CloudHealth, a cost management and optimization tool by CloudHealth Technologies.
- Productivity: Automation frameworks reduce the time that a team spends configuring and deploying infrastructure, providing a substantial gain in efficiency. According to DevOps Guru, Gene Kim, high-performing IT teams, leveraging DevOps automation are “able to complete the deployments from code committed to running a production 8,000 times faster.”
About Six Nines
Six Nines helps customers move to the cloud responsibly. Headquartered in Oakland CA, with offices around the world, Six Nines has helped hundreds of customers Architect, Migrate and Maintain their cloud infrastructure. As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with over eight years of experience, Six Nines is a leader in the cloud space.
Learn More
To learn more about how Six Nines and AWS can help you deploy your DevOps environment, DevOps on AWS.
Source for Gene Kim quote: https://DevOps.com/a-q-a-with-gene-kim-DevOps-and-what-separates-high-performing-enterprises/