Using AWS to help an events company to rapidly scale and flex their Drupal 9 site
aps Events & Media create, technically manage, and produce events and conferences on a global scale as a fully integrated events agency.
We’ve been working with them for a number of years and are happy to work closely with aps on a regular basis.
We have extensive experience with what we call “project recovery. If a project runs into an unexpected obstacle, we are available to help. Say the site crashes or a client experiences deployment issues. We are able to collaborate with an in-house team or even with other Drupal agencies if they are the lead. Or we can pick up where the project has been left off.
Situation
Unfortunately, as a result of the pandemic, events firms had either gone bankrupt or had to drastically alter their business models to compete online. The industry, at the time, initially did not have the infrastructure in place to cope with this sudden demand. As such, many businesses sadly failed.
Luckily, we were there. We needed to be incredibly reactive to ensure aps could continue to offer the same great events service in a new digital format.
What we did and outcomes
To start, we manually scaled their infrastructure. Then collaborated with the team at aps to automate that scaling process to make it less time consuming, which is why we built an AWS autoscaling environment for them.
More recently, we completed quick build work for aps. Allowing for quick scalability during events based on candidate quantities.
Applications are constantly monitored by AWS Auto Scaling, which then makes any necessary capacity adjustments in order to keep performance consistent and predictable while reducing costs as much as feasible. It only takes a few minutes to set up application scaling with AWS Auto Scaling, and this can be done for various resources across several different services.
The service offers a user interface that is both straightforward and powerful, allowing our clients (or us on their behalf) to construct scaling plans for a wide variety of resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances and Spot Fleets, Amazon ECS tasks, Amazon DynamoDB tables and indexes, and Amazon Aurora Replicas.
AWS Auto Scaling simplifies the process of scaling by providing recommendations that optimise either performance or costs, or strike a compromise between the two.
When they need to create a new event, the process is now almost fully automated. We reduced the turnaround time from five to one day.
So now aps can react much more swiftly to customer requests for events with less manual involvement from us.
Drupal 9
More recently, we helped move aps over to Drupal 9. Now all their sites are on the latest version. We made sure the hosting environment complied with Drupal 9's new specifications to guarantee a smooth migration. Then, we eliminated any usage of an out-of-date API in their custom code. All the features from Drupal 8 were carried over to Drupal 9, but with updated system specifications and security-related components. With twice-yearly feature additions, adopting Drupal 9 will allow aps to continue being innovative in their industry.
Plus, being on Drupal 9 will make it as easy as possible as and when they are ready to adopt Drupal 10.
What aps say
You guys are crushing it! Exceeding our expectations.
Peter - Senior Technical Project Manager
