MyHeritage
Migration to AWS
AWS: ECS, EFS, Fargate, S3, ALB, Terraform, Spacelift, Cloudwatch
About
MyHeritage is an online genealogy platform that provides users with tools to build their family trees, discover family history, and connect with relatives worldwide. Additionally, MyHeritage hosts the Legacy Family Tree webinar website, which offers educational content for genealogy enthusiasts.
Challenge
MyHeritage faced several challenges with their existing setup:
- Performance issues due to increased traffic.
- A desire to move to an AWS-based architecture aligned with their tech stack.
- The need for horizontal-autoscaling capabilities, reliable storage, and scheduled backups.
- The requirement to automate processes such as deployments and backups.
- Multiple cloud-based environments.
Solution
Dcode.tech proposed and implemented a comprehensive solution to address these challenges. The project involved building an ECS-based architecture using the following components:
- Autoscaling ECS Service based on Fargate: For containerized wordpress deployment.
- EFS (Elastic File System): For storage and persistency in an autoscaled ECS Service. - Multiple ECS Tasks can connect to the same EFS Storage for their data.
- Highly available MySQL RDS: For database management with auto-growing storage.
- ElastiCache Redis: For caching to improve performance.
- ALB (Application Load Balancer): For load balancing across instances.
- AWS Lambda: For automating backups and deployments, scheduled using EventBridge, or triggered via API Gateway exposed only to certain IPs.
- S3 Buckets: For storing consistent backups of the file systems.
- CloudWatch Logs and Dashboards: For logging and monitoring application performance metrics such as HTTP codes, CPU, memory, and desired replicas.
- Terraform: For managing all infrastructure.
- Spacelift: For deployment of Terraform code.
Results
The migration to the new AWS-based architecture provided MyHeritage with significant benefits:
- Performance Improvement: Autoscaling and Redis caching allowed for better handling of increased traffic, leading to a smoother user experience.
- Full Control Over Infrastructure: The move to AWS gave MyHeritage complete control over their infrastructure, enabling them to use their standard tools like Terraform, Spacelift, and AWS SSO.
- Cost Reduction: The new architecture lowered overall infrastructure costs by optimising resource usage and horizontally autoscaling compute.
- Enhanced Automation: Automated processes for backups and deployments reduced manual intervention and improved efficiency.
- Reliable Storage and Backups: Consistent and scheduled backups ensured data integrity and availability.