Whitepaper for Cutshort, a ‘Tech Hiring’ Platform
Prepared by: Velocita Brand Consultants Pvt. Ltd.
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Title:
A DevOps exercise to cut short deployment time while ramping up security and savings for a leading tech hiring platform
The Client
Cutshort is a tech hiring platform in India. The platform connects employers with top management systems, engages with them, identifies the best candidates, and closes positions in a way that enables hirers to execute their vision quickly.
Cutshort is more than just a networking platform; it uses AI algorithms and gamification to source and connect talent to opportunity. Its high rate of success rate has quickly made it the leading tech hiring platform in the subcontinent.
The Challenge
AI processes were helping hiring automation and recruitment efficiency, but the competition to attract high-quality candidates is fierce, and Cutshort needed its systems to be revamped on a continuous basis to allow fresh updates to the system (for instance, chatbots to collect information beyond resumes, automated scheduling of interviews, etc.). This called for a certain degree of DevOps muscularity.
Migrating the entire solution infrastructure to AWS would take care of availability and scalability in terms of workload, traffic, and peak hours. But it also needed to be costeffective, and secure. This would be enabled through the implementation of AWS security measures on all Cutshort’s AWS accounts with the ability to receive notifications for all alerts.
Cutshort engaged Applied AI Consulting (AAIC) to resolve their challenges and execute the entire project.
Solution
It was clear from the outset that DevOps adoption was the answer to Cutshort’s specific issues. Automation, coupled with quick development and equally speedy deployment would allow them to increase their productivity, optimize processes and enjoy a stronger collaborative work environment.
AWS Partner AAIC kicked off the project by interacting with the client’s engineering, product management, and IT team to fully understand the application’s functional and business requirements from the perspective of the end-user and took the below key steps to provide the following solution:
• AAIC redesigned the organization’s IT architecture to include the use of ECS Fargate with Autoscaling & SPOT instead of ECS NodeGroups. This will help Cutshort save on costs as well as enable it to scale automatically
• Cutshort wasn’t using any Infrastructure-as-a-Code (IaaC) tool; we brought in Terraform, so they could spin up new solution infrastructure in a few minutes and deploy it seamlessly using a CI pipeline.
• With the help of Terraform, AAIC created a new infrastructure for Cutshort which was secured with the help of AWS services and resources such as AWS WAF, NACL’s, and internal load balancers. We also implemented alerts and notifications using AWS Cloudwatch and SNS.
• AAIC optimized Cutshort’s AWS accounts by getting them on AWS's savings plan. This will create significant cost benefits for the organization.
• Another step towards helping them in managing their accounts was to set up consolidated billing. Getting one bill for multiple accounts means easier tracking of charges and scrutiny of cost and usage data. Plus the ability to combine usage across all accounts, allows the organization to benefit from such features as volume pricing discounts, savings plans, and discounts on reserved instances. Since there is no fee for consolidated billing, it was another saving.
• Cutshort was using G-suite for various reasons, including email, calendar, docs, etc. We made it easier for them to manage access and user permissions, by integrating it with the IAM Identity Center, giving Cutshort’s administrators single sign-on centralized access to all their AWS accounts.
Tech Stack
AWS ECS, AWS Load Balancers, AWS WAF, AWS SNS, AWS Cloudwatch Log Group
Outcomes
25% – 30% Cost Savings
With new infrastructure and the introduction of features like AWS Savings plan and Consolidated Billing, and their application across their AWS accounts, Cutshort has been able to save 25-30% of their cost compared to earlier budgets.
Speedy Deployment
Implementation of CodeDeploy and GitHub Actions (A CI/CD tool) has made deployment significantly speedier. Cutshort is now able to move changes to production easily and faster than ever. Earlier production changes happened, at best, once in two weeks but now they are happening in barely two days.
About AAIC
AAIC has a certified cloud engineering team that provides the needed expertise and service to move your on-premises data centre to AWS Cloud. It takes the code from existing version control to the open-source library GitHub, debugs, and makes it operational on AWS. During the entire 5 step process, AAIC solution architects and our cloud engineering team work closely with your team to deliver a secure, scalable, and highperforming solution, post-migration.
