Quantis: Productivity and Agility Thanks to Managed Services
Hello and welcome to 'This is My Architecture'.
Today, I have the pleasure to be joined by Alexandre Herbert
from Quantis. Hello Alexandre.
Hello Jerome, thank you for hosting.
Thank you for joining us.
Alexandre, can you briefly tell us what you do at Quantis?
Absolutely. Quantis is an environmental consultancy firm founded in 2006.
We currently have 200 associates throughout Europe and North America.
Our mission is to guide companies
in assessing the environmental impact of their activities
and to help them develop a strategy for the future
that will enable them to reduce their environmental impact.
As for myself, I am on the Digital Solutions team
The Digital Solutions team develops SAS solutions
to measure the environmental impact of products.
Alright.
I suppose that this is one of the applications we will be discussing today.
So, I see quite a few things.
I notice that you are using Fargate.
I presume this is the core of the application.
Exactly, so among the projects that we do,
we have projects that are consequently Multi-Tenant,
with multinational companies.
We have a requirement for scalability.
Yet simultaneously, we're a small team.
Therefore, the use of AWS Fargate was the solution
for deploying our application in a container-based manner
without having to handle physical servers.
Alright, very good.
Another managed service that I notice is RDS MySQL.
So, you're operating RDS associated with Fargate.
Exactly, so we made the decision to house our databases on RDS.
Fargate and RDS are implemented in Multi-AZ,
which allows us to have the data replicated
in a primary/replica system
and to easily set up a snapshot system with RDS
and to carry out
encryption at rest.
Alright.
Everything is service-managed.
I see that to implement all of this, you're using CodeDeploy, ERC.
Can you elaborate slightly on what that has enabled you to do?
On the Digital Solution team, we've been trying to remove
all the deployment parts that were done manually.
Thus, the first step is to push our Docker image into ECR.
The second step is carried out by CodeDeploy,
which retrieves the Docker image from ECR
and then enables us to deploy it in Fargate.
The great benefit of CodeDeploy
is that it enables us to do a deployment without service interruption
with a blue-green system.
Alright.
So that covers the operational side.
I see that you have several components that you were talking about,
you have SAS applications.
I wonder if you could elaborate on how you manage the multi-tenancy?
The notion of security is very important for our customers.
We have multi-tenant applications.
We chose to use Cognito to manage our customer's identities.
With Cognito, we were able to federate identities
quite easily by following the SAML and Oo2 standards.
Cognito can be seamlessly integrated into the front end of our applications
through the Amplify SDK.
Moreover, since we're talking about security, we've implemented quite a few AWS services,
such as WAF, which will enable us to protect our APIs
on behalf of our diverse customers, which is something that is of great importance to them
and therefore prior to the load balancer
which enables access to our Fargate instances.
The replication, definitely.
Alright.
So, that's very good, a SAS application.
I imagine that you're going to be developing more applications like that.
What are the next moves for you at Quantis?
Well, we do have some projects coming up.
One of those is going to involve data processing.
We are currently designing workflows.
We could actually use the AWS implementation of Apache Airflow
to set this up.
We're also in the process of doing some dashboard visualization
as part of another project.
So, we're considering AWS QuickSight as a potential solution.
Great, alright.
Thanks for sharing that with us, Alexandre.
Thank you, Jerome.
Thanks for watching 'This is My Architecture'.