Unlocking the future of Silverstripe Cloud with an AWS accelerator

Silverstripe Cloud has a barrier holding back the innovation of your application environments. While our client-environment infrastructure is incredible for its day, it has a rock-sized engineering challenge standing between you and your environment’s provisioning, deploying, configuring and restoring using today’s cutting-edge features. So we asked ourselves, what does it take to move that barrier?

Silverstripe is focused on ongoing innovation and improving our platforms.

A few weeks ago, we hosted a MODernisation AXeleration, Experience-Based Accelerator (MODAX EBA) at our Wellington office. The 3-day event was designed to speed up the modernisation of Silverstripe on the AWS cloud by tackling critical factors.

The challenge: 3 days, 5 teams, 1 goal—unlock the future for client environments

MODAX EBA is about pushing boundaries. AWS, who generously sponsored the event, brought their specialists into our Wellington office. In the lead-up to the event, Silverstripe’s platform and engineering teams engaged in 6 weeks of organisation, co-design and immersion days, dedicated to planning and deciding our modernisation approach. It was a significant effort, and AWS's support was invaluable.

We gathered 5 teams in the room, including engineers and solutions architects, flying in from across the country. Including a mascot, our Principal Engineer’s golden retriever, Chase! 

Goals and achievements

As costs rise, we want our customers to always unlock new value whenever we need to update our pricing. Our EBA is designed to:

• Introduce new security controls to save our customers treating those controls themselves
• Speed up our rate of innovation so customers can expect improvements to their self-service experience faster
• Upskill our team so customers can benefit from our experts
• Optimise costs with new systems and automation so customers get more for their price.

Our primary goals for the accelerator were to:

• Successfully complete an intensive in-person accelerator over 3 days at the Silverstripe office in Wellington
• Split a core component of our monolithic system and transition its maintenance to another team. This meant moving support operations from engineering to the tech service desk.

Here’s a glimpse at what we achieved in those 3 days:

• A re-architected client-infrastructure service
• Increased security controls in logical and network separation (A.13 Communications security) and access control (A.9 Access control)
• A DevOps model for Level 3 client-infrastructure support
• The next upgrade for our self-service Silverstripe Dashboard
• Increased security management controls in data processing and monitoring (A.12 Operations security, A.6 Organisation of Information Security)
• Enhanced Service Management characteristics in our reporting dashboards. 

AWS was stoked with our achievement and gave us incredible feedback. It’s a testament to the hard work and talent of everyone involved. We have some of the best technical teams in the country at Silverstripe.

Looking ahead

While we’ve made significant progress, there’s still work to be done. The release process will take time, but the new design is solid, and the integrity of what we’ve built meets the high standards you expected from Silverstripe.

A big thank you to everyone involved, especially Richard Tom from AWS, and Jackson Darlow and Gina Deshmukh from Silverstripe, for their leadership during the program.

This experience has highlighted what we can achieve when we come together with clear goals and strong support. The future of Silverstripe on AWS is better than ever.