Expanding and scaling DevOps services and AWS cloud operations – OurBond

OurBond, a trailblazing, pioneering personal security company offers innovative security services that are fueled by a mix of trained Personal Security Agents in Command Centers and technology — all working together to address the various array of everyday safety concerns. Equipped with the ability to connect quickly and securely to first-responders should the situation escalate, working from physical command centers to assist members via a mobile app, utilizing cutting-edge security protocols, and streamlining operational efficiency while maintaining the most stringent of compliance requirements. Founded in 2017, OurBond is headquartered in New York City and offers its services to thousands of members across the United States and globally. Led by a dedicated, multidisciplinary team of professionals and growing quickly. Bond is a high-growth, freemium consumer service that has raised over $60 million since its inception.

OurBond relies on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) as the foundation of its application infrastructure, ensuring its capacity to support the fast-paced evolution of security and response offerings and meet the rising demands of its clients, whilst integrating seamlessly with various other managed AWS services to enhance and ease the operational efficiency, such as Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon ElastiCache Redis. These services and more constitute the backbone of Ourbond’s ability to serve its customers reliably.

Develeap provides OurBond with the full range of DevOps, secure cloud services and operations, effectively functioning as the OurBond DevOps department. 

The Challenge:

To accomplish its business goals, OurBond needed to manage and expand its entire DevOps operations and platforms to allow rapid deployment, while maintaining stability and continuously supporting fast-paced scale-up and cost-effective scale-down, and allow easy transparent governance to answer rapidly changing demands from its growing global customer base. 

Following the decision to expand the company’s DevOps operations and efficiency, the company chose to leverage its existing AWS infrastructure and services. This included Amazon EKS as the central processing platform and many other related AWS services and build upon it to suit and complement Ourbond’s technological and business needs. 

The Solution:

Develeap manages the ongoing day-to-day DevOps needs and challenges of the customer, while also presenting a comprehensive tailor-made Gap Analysis, identifying the technological requirements based on OurBond’s business needs and scaling forecasts, defining the requisite architecture for both build deployment and run-time, and an implementation plan using the AWS well-architected methodology. Develeap’s teams stabilized OurBond’s DevOps workflow and methodologies, including:

• AWS Cloud Infrastructure:  Leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) for flexibility and scalability. Lean into managed services such as Aurora and Amazon EKS to lower operational overhead.
• DevSecOps Culture: Embracing DevSecOps principles for faster development cycles with security in focus. 
• Terraform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Using Terraform for efficient infrastructure management and Terraform Cloud for state visibility.
• Security Best Practices: Implementing robust security measures, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, 2FA, threat detection with Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon CloudTrail for audits, and AWS Config for various compliance checks.
• Cost Optimization: Utilizing AWS Cost Explorer, comprehensive spot instances usage, and right-sizing of resources.

Collaborating with Develeap was vital to maintaining and upgrading sustainable production and staging environments that can expand in scale to allow OurBond to offer flawless integration, within tried and tested scaling limits, to an expanding global client roster. To help bolster a secure and optimized network infrastructure, develeap implemented a comprehensive solution involving the creation of architecture diagrams, compute optimization rework, better comprehensive monitoring and logging, fine-tuning and reworking all alert thresholds, and the implementation of, and adherence to, security best practices. This solution also leverages several AWS services to ensure a robust and efficient environment.

Develeap built upon and enhanced existing solutions to monitor and log the environments, utilizing AWS services such as GuardDuty, AWS WAF, AWS Security Hub, and AWS Trusted Advisor to monitor for potential threats continuously, protect applications from web exploits, provide centralized security visibility, and offer recommendations to optimize the AWS infrastructure configuration. Develeap also helped developers understand these tools and how to utilize them for better and more efficient development.

The solution also prioritized implementing security best practices to help with OurBond’s journey to achieve ISO27001 compliance and ensure systems and data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Strict access controls, regular security assessments, and compliance monitoring were expanded and implemented to mitigate risks and maintain a secure environment while enhancing visibility.

Overall, the solution implemented by Develeap encompassed network architecture diagrams, compute optimization, monitoring and logging, audit and compliance, development integration, and security best practices. By utilizing various AWS services, Bond’s infrastructure is more secure, efficient, and cost-effective.

Results and Benefits:

The collaboration between Develeap and OurBond has played a strategic part in creating OurBond’s stable and sustainable production and staging environments, supporting their sales operations, managing their environments, and assisting with QA and testing. The collaboration has yielded significant outcomes:

–  Enhanced Security: Compliance with industry standards ensured data protection.

–  Scalability: Rapid scaling to meet growing demand.

– Efficient Collaboration: DevSecOps principles improved collaboration among teams.

–  High Availability: Multi-AZ deployment ensured uninterrupted service availability.

– Shift left mentality: introduction of several tools to empower developers’ accountability and security.

About Develeap: 

Develeap, an AWS Advanced Partner, specializes in DevOps and professional services. With a team of skilled DevOps engineers, they help customers manage and support various technologies, including Kubernetes, Cloud, CI/CD processes, Infrastructure as Code, and more. Develeap ensures that infrastructure meets high standards of security, performance, and availability.

Through close collaboration with OurBond, Develeap delivers tailored solutions following AWS best practices, supporting continuous growth and security. This collaboration has resulted in streamlined workflows, rapid response to growing customer requirements, and a commitment to customer satisfaction.

OurBond’s journey to enhance DevOps and cloud operations efficiency serves as an inspiring example. By choosing AWS, adopting a DevSecOps culture, implementing robust security and cost optimization measures, and using Kubernetes as the foundation, OurBond positioned itself as a leader and pioneer in the rapidly growing personal security industry.