PatchKit conquers the gaming world with Chaos Gears’ optimization tips

The review was carried out in close cooperation with the client and performed in several stages that comply with AWS Well-Architected best practices to ensure the architecture’s quality.

From the client’s point of view, the most important issue was to collaborate with a partner who understood what PatchKit is all about. One that would help select and apply only business-relevant recommendations from the available best practices.

The infrastructure design should be simple and clear to someone who is not well versed in it. A design that cannot be maintained is inefficient. We decided against some of the proposed solutions because they increase the complexity of the entire solution and even if they are good architecturally, they may have a different effect on the desired outcome.

— Piotr Korzuszek, CEO, PatchKit

The result of the review was the selection and remediation of detected threats by Chaos Gears architects. In the case of PatchKit they indicated: 11 medium risks and 10 high risks. 

Security (4 high risks), including:

1. Established the central management of the company's AWS accounts in one place  with the implementation of an Security Control Policies (SCP) mechanism, defining the maximum permissions for account members in the organization.
2. Improved management of the AWS environment by launching the AWS CloudTrail service for the AWS accounts used, recording user actions, roles and AWS services. Implementing rules informs admins about unauthorized attempts to create a new IAM user or attempts to access the account without multi-factor authentication (MFA).
3. Restriction of permissions, e.g., for identity and access management (IAM) users by testing for automatic rules compliance with resources and the detection of weak policies.

Reliability (2 high risks), including:

1. Improve application performance and injection and other tests. Checking whether they pass tests from Chaos Engineering and FIS (AWS Fault Injection Simulator) services.
2. Creating protection against potential attacks on the client's environment by using test templates for selected services (e.g. simulating attacks on Lambda) created by Chaos’ engineers for the project.

Cost optimization (3 high risks), including:

1. Setting notifications about the upcoming, predefined monthly limit threshold and other overrun risks. Also, enabling standard budget monitoring through the activation of the AWS billing service.
2. Preparation of dashboards with visualizations of parameters detected by Amazon Trusted Advisor for all accounts in AWS organizations. This allows, among others, admins to identify unused resources versus costs or/and quickly locate accounts and users.

All actions set out in the recovery plan were implemented within the target deadline. All identified threats have been eliminated. After introducing changes to the infrastructure, a report was generated, highlighting improvements in the defined areas. Finally, the updated system is better secured and ready to serve customers, and to scale.

As expected, we learned a lot about good practices, and the existence of many important solutions that we weren’t aware of. We will now be using them in our business and we have saved a lot of time on necessary research.

— Piotr Korzuszek, CEO, PatchKit

The cloud changes as the SaaS product evolves. Thanks to the revisions, PatchKit's AWS environment is better protected against attacks and failures. The SaaS is still evolving and more changes are needed. Thanks to the changes, the organization of work and operations is better optimized. Selected components are prepared to scale the product while maintaining appropriate performance and cost levels.