Automating Cloud Infrastructure and Enhancing Security for a Financial Services Company

Discovery and Requirements Gathering: Curate’s team carried out a thorough evaluation of the client’s existing infrastructure, procedures, and processes. Through collaborative discussions with the client’s IT and DevOps Team, our consultants identified the following key focus areas:

• Automation: Automate the provisioning and configuration management of the infrastructure.

• Security controls: Include security controls in the pipeline for continuous integration and development.

• Streamline deployments: Use containerization to make application deployments more efficient.

• Scalability and resource optimization: Boost AWS’s scalability and resource efficiency.

• Enhanced security: Increase security by using automated monitoring and threat detection.

Automating the infrastructure with Terraform and Jenkins:

• Terraform: Curate introduced IaC using Terraform scripts to reduce manual intervention. These would automate the provisioning and management of AWS resources such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, and S3 buckets, and would enable the client to control its infrastructure via code.

• Jenkins: A CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins was put into place to significantly cut down on the time required to spin up new environments and deploy updates. The pipeline was triggered to deliver containerized applications via Docker, and infrastructure provisioning via Terraform scripts.

Containerization with Docker: Docker containers for applications removed configuration errors and allowed for uniform deployment across infrastructure and environments. Additionally, Jenkins CI/CD pipelines automatically created Docker images from the application code and deployed them to the production environment, thus automating and expediting the application deployment process.

Automating security using AWS and Terraform: Keeping in mind the client’s stringent security and compliance requirements, our team directly embedded security controls into the infrastructure automation process.

• Identity and Access Management roles, security groups, encryption policies, and multifactor authentication were defined and enforced using Terraform.

• AWS CloudTrail, Config, and GuardDuty were used to continuously monitor for security threats and misconfigurations.

• The controls were automatically applied to all infrastructure components to ensure compliance with industry laws such as PCI-DSS. Automated alerts were set up to warn in case of any suspicious activity.

Scaling Infrastructure with AWS Auto Scaling: Curate configured Auto Scaling to automatically modify the number of EC2 instances based on predefined metrics, such as CPU usage or request traffic. This resulted in optimized resources and costs due to dynamic adjustment of compute resources based on real-time demand.

Monitoring and continuous improvement: To monitor the health and performance of the automated infrastructure, AWS CloudWatch, AWS GuardDuty, and AWS Inspector were set up to continuously scan the infrastructure for known flaws, malware, and unauthorized access attempts. 

Training and Change Management: Curate provided detailed documentation, guidelines, training, and change management support to the client’s internal teams so they could run the systems independently. The training covered:

• Managing and monitoring the CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins.

• Best practices for using Terraform to manage IaC.

• Deploying and managing Docker containers for applications.

• Security best practices for managing cloud infrastructure on AWS.

Ongoing support and optimization: Post-deployment, our team regularly reviewed the performance of the infrastructure such as the CI/CD pipelines, security controls, and infrastructure scalability, and made adjustments as necessary to further reduce costs and enhance security.