Platform

AWS

Luma is a learning and instructional design company offering flexible training solutions across several industries. It has been making a measurable difference in learning outcomes since its founding in 2008. In 2014, Luma found a unique niche in the transportation industry helping educate truck drivers. It developed a learning management system and leverages continuous integration continuous development (CI/CD) to roll out new and updated features regularly.

Luma has created many first in industry features for learning and training in the transportation industry. They conduct research on drivers’ learning preferences to provide the best possible learning experience. Luma’s products DRIVE SAFE, DRIVE FIT, and DRIVE FIRST are all grounded in learning science. They understand that different carriers and drivers have different needs and works with carriers to customize their learning environments. Luma’s application workloads were initially migrated to AWS by Connectria’s professional services team and then transitioned to the managed services team to provide ongoing 24×7 network and security operations support for their AWS environment.

Challenge

Luma’s entire business critical application ran on a dedicated server with a fixed resource pool. Last year, the company more than doubled its customer base and realized that their current support model was insufficient. They needed an alternative and knew that AWS might be the answer.

They also knew that AWS was not their area of expertise, and that success would hinge on finding the right partner to plan and execute a migration that would deliver optimal performance, cost, scale, and redundancy in the cloud. Once migrated, the new AWS environment would need to come under the watchful eye of a managed services provider to ensure a secure operation with continuous optimization and support.

“As a company we handle education, training, and other business functions. Working in the transportation and logistics industry, it is important for us to provide reliable services 24/7,” said Scott Anderson, Luma CTO. In response to its continued growth, Luma made the decision to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in order to take advantage of the scalability and performance of the cloud.

Luma began diligently preparing for their migration project in early 2020 in order to ensure everything was ready. The end goal for Luma was to find the right partner specializing in migration and managed services. Luma also needed this partner to have strong competence in security and compliance. After a lengthy evaluation process, Luma signed with Connectria in September 2020.

Solution

Connectria fully migrated Luma to AWS by late November 2020. Autoscaling, load balancers, and multi-AZ deployments of EFS, RDS, and Elasticache were implemented by Connectria in the Luma environment to support the high availability of their application. The new AWS account architecture was designed using a landing zone to provide a robust and secure mechanism for isolating control and data plane access to resources. The account boundary is very effective at protecting against human error and limit vulnerability points.

Non-peered VPCs residing within the same account provided excellent network isolation and protected against policy misconfigurations. Additionally, Connectria provided advanced security support with its 24/7 security operations center (SOC). These services provided incident response and administration, as well as advanced intrusion prevention and automated security tooling.

“In the end, it came down to Connectria’s ability to offer more services at entry-level, specifically around security. I need to be able to monitor things, from a security perspective, without having those services as an add-on. Connectria had security as more of a prominent focus at the base level which was exactly what I was looking for. We have several developers involved, so it was important to have a way to deploy changes without errors. We did a lot of work on our end to identify the best process and Connectria helped us further develop the deployment process we now have active,” said Anderson.

Results

Connectria handled Luma’s cloud migration and continues providing support for the management of Luma’s AWS environment. “Our relationship with Connectria has been really good for us. Creating and having the DevOps deployment process has been my favorite part about working with Connectria. It’s significantly better than what we were doing previously and a major improvement on our side,” said Anderson.

He continues, “We also have incident response assistance that we thankfully haven’t had a need requiring Connectria to show that side of their support. While hopefully we never do, it’s a comfort to know support is readily available in the event it is ever needed. Any time I have raised a ticket with Connectria’s team, I’ve been happy with the level of support.”