Secure AWS Deployment and Scaling for Neptune Navigate Marketing Platform
Deploying a secure, scalable education platform on AWS with Blue/Green releases, peak-hour auto-scaling, and centralized security visibility
CMC Neptune’s marketing education platform faced performance strain during high concurrent logins, lacked rollback-ready deployments, and needed stronger compliance and access controls. KnackForge implemented a secure, multi-tier AWS architecture with EC2 Auto Scaling, Blue/Green deployments, and centralized security posture monitoring, enabling predictable performance during business-hour surges and achieving a 93% security score.
Challenges
- High concurrent logins during business hours degraded performance without dynamic scaling.
- No rollback-ready deployment approach increased release risk and operational disruption.
- Limited security visibility impacted compliance reporting and posture tracking.
- Admin access requires secure, audit-ready mechanisms beyond basic IAM-only access.
- Needed strict network isolation using public and private subnets within a VPC.
- Required support for zero-downtime backend updates using Blue/Green deployments.
The Solution
- Designed a VPC with public and private subnet isolation across three Availability Zones to separate web access and backend resources.
- Implemented EC2 Auto Scaling to dynamically provision compute based on peak login trends and usage patterns.
- Deployed an Application Load Balancer (ALB) for HTTPS routing with health checks and integrated AWS WAF for application-layer protection.
- Implemented Blue/Green deployments for backend services to enable seamless rollouts and immediate rollback without downtime.
- Centralized security monitoring using AWS Security Hub with compliance checks, plus IAM policies for least-privilege access controls.
- Enabled secure admin access using a VPN server on EC2, with sensitive credentials managed in AWS Secrets Manager.
The Impact
With KnackForge Cloud Services in place, the customer experienced:
- Security score improved from ~75% to 93% using AWS Security Hub and compliance checks.
- Deployment downtime reduced from ~5 minutes to 0 minutes using Blue/Green deployment strategy.
- Release time from dev to prod decreased from 60 minutes to 20 minutes with an automated pipeline.
- Monthly incident reports reduced from 6 to 1 post-deployment.
- EC2 resource usage efficiency improved by ~30% during peak hours due to predictive scaling alignment.
- Infrastructure costs optimized through right-sizing, improved tagging visibility, and removal of redundant resources.
Technologies Used:
- Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
- Application Load Balancer (ALB)
- Amazon RDS (MySQL)
- Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront
- AWS WAF and AWS IAM
- AWS Security Hub (with AWS Secrets Manager and Amazon Route 53)