Platform

AWS

Biblica, the International Bible Society, is a worldwide ministry. Their mission focuses on providing the Bible in accurate, contemporary translations and formats so that more people around the world will have the opportunity to be transformed by Jesus Christ. Their vision is to see the Bible be used by God to redeem the lost, restore the broken, and inspire the Body of Christ to be a community of hope for the world.

Biblica is a global Bible ministry inspired by radical generosity. For more than 200 years, Biblica has helped people beyond the reach of God’s Word discover the love of Jesus Christ through contemporary Bible translation. They continue to produce relevant and reliable Scripture translations and resources that minister to people on the margins of the Gospel—the unreached, unengaged, unseen, and unwanted.

Challenge

Biblica, as the leading digital scripture provider, needed support for managing their AWS environment. They host digital scripture services translated into many languages and distributed worldwide through a shared storage solution. Prior to coming to Connectria, Biblica built its AWS architecture with the goal to leverage the elasticity, low storage costs, and global infrastructure of the cloud.

It was very important for Biblica to ensure that their environment is available 24/7 for clients across all time zones and is able to handle heavy traffic spikes during holidays, all while remaining cost-effective. Biblica also wanted to guarantee that they could monitor their front-end service for that availability, with a preference for cloud-native solutions.

Solution

Since coming under Connectria’s managed services in 2017, Connectria has supported Biblica through a re-architecture of their environment including the implementation of autoscaling groups and load balancing to help support their traffic spikes. The Connectria team also consolidated underutilized resources to improve the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of Biblica’s environment. Through these changes, Connectria leveraged third-party monitoring tools as well as AWS CloudWatch to log changes and identify anomalies.

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides data and actionable insights to monitor applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers.

Connectria enables flow logs from CloudWatch for elastic network interfaces (ENI) along with access, error, and web application firewall (WAF) logs for EC2 instances as part of our standard support protocol. To meet Biblica’s specific monitoring and logging needs, the Connectria team also established CloudWatch logs to track the Lambda scripts running across multiple regions within a centralized repository. Connectria also leverages CloudWatch alarms to monitor service-specific activity on Biblica’s Elastic File System (EFS) and Application Load Balancers (ALB).

Results

The level of monitoring and support that Connectria is able to provide to Biblica has led to a fruitful partnership with Connectria supporting the strategic deployment of additional resources to access multiple regions, decrease latency, and improve end-user satisfaction. Connectria helped Biblica embrace many benefits of AWS including:

• Central file repository that provides elasticity
• Monitoring the system that covers multiple regions across the globe
• Logging capabilities to track errors and traffic across the platform
• Notification ability to alert any issues with the file system and application health

Given Biblica’s global scope, CloudWatch’s centralized logging for their AWS account allows Connectria to quickly identify issues in Biblica’s environment. The CloudWatch monitors Connectria established help ensure that Biblica’s environment is running successfully while taking advantage of the benefits of cloud including elasticity, high availability, and fault tolerance to maintain high uptimes and reduce their spend over time.

About Biblica

Biblica, the International Bible Society, is a worldwide ministry that has been helping people engage with God’s Word for over 200 years. We are committed to bringing the Bible to people in a way they understand, so they can be transformed by Christ and inspired to join His mission for the world.

https://www.biblica.com/