Success Stories – VPP

In March 2023, the project started, with the initial phase concluding in July of the same year. The primary focus was to review and enhance Virtual Parking Permits’ AWS infrastructure, addressing scalability, performance, networking, monitoring, logging, and security. The existing setup consisted of Elastic Beanstalk, EC2 instances, S3 buckets for the front end, and network databases.

Key Infrastructure Optimizations included:

• Monitoring Alarms: Robust monitoring alarms to proactively address performance issues were configured.
• Database Security: Enhanced database security measures.
• Logging Security: Improved logging methods and security.
• Deployment Pipelines: Hardcoded and exposed passwords and secrets in deployment pipelines were eliminated.
• Instance Transition: Vulnerable public instances migrated to more secure private instances.
• Cost Optimization: Costs associated with underutilized services were identified and reduced.

Given the need for 24/7 availability, changes were first tested in development environments to avoid downtime in the production environment. Once validated in development, modifications were rolled out to the production environment.

The DinoCloud team proposed these tasks through extensive discovery sessions at the project’s outset. With Virtual Parking Permits initially having only one person managing their cloud infrastructure, DinoCloud also facilitated the technical resource’s deepening of AWS cloud knowledge. This collaboration led to a service renewal between Virtual Parking Permits and DinoCloud, entering a second stage focused on ongoing support and fine-tuning to optimize AWS resource usage.

The project between Virtual Parking Permits with DinoCloud produced significant results:

• Improved CPU Management: Enhanced CPU performance in Elastic Beanstalk through comprehensive monitoring, reducing downtime.
• Proactive Alarms: Effective alarm management to address potential downtime before it occurs.
• Enhanced Logging: Improved logging practices for better visibility and security.
• Security Enhancements: More secure private subnets, VPC, and security groups to minimize exposure to databases and networking.
• Cost Optimization: Reduced costs by eliminating unused services.

This collaboration evolved into an efficient, secure, and cost-effective parking permit management system. This transformation ensures smoother operations, cost savings, and enhanced security, setting Virtual Parking Permits on a path to industry leadership.