Turners Automotive Group (TAG) is a New Zealand company providing an ecosystem of vehicle services that helps people buy, sell, finance and insure their vehicles. Formed in 2014 through the merger of Turners Auctions and Dorchester Pacific, the range of trusted brands and businesses includes Automotive Retail, Finance, Credit Control, and Insurance services.
TAG wanted to leverage the benefits and opportunities Amazon Web Services offers into their product teams to realise value for their customers. ClearPoint was engaged to work with TAG to establish strong cloud foundations that allows TAG's Software Engineers to build and deploy cloud solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the future.
The Driving force
TAG wanted to establish a robust foundation for their product teams to build cloud-native applications. The priority was to set up and govern a secure, compliant, multi-account AWS environment based on best practices. The key goals were to:
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Enable modernisation of platforms in their Auctions, Finance & Insurance business verticals
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Enable innovation and flexibility across these verticals which currently doesn’t exist in a scalable and future proofed way
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Utilising experience of ClearPoint professionals to upskill Turners’ internal team capability using best practices for modern cloud apps
TAG had an on-prem presence where the core data services were to remain, but had identified three initial workloads which would be built on AWS. Instead of creating a few AWS accounts, TAG's goal was to establish an automated account factory and shared connectivity patterns.
With constrained in-house senior software engineering expertise to shift to AWS, Turners Automotive Group required software engineering experts to partner with them and support the project. ClearPoint was engaged by TAG to assist with the discovery, initial design and support implementation.
The Approach
ClearPoint worked collaboratively with TAG using the following phased approach:
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Initial discovery to fully understand the requirements
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Planning to establish a delivery timeline
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Design phase involving technical decisions, proof-of-concepts, and proposals for future phases
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Implementation to deliver the agreed design
The agreed solution was based on the AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform (AFT). The solution not only implemented the must-have steps (such as configuration of AFT and Terraform Cloud, establishing the initial AWS organisation OU structure, and configuring AWS SSO and AD user/group synchronisation), but also many extensive AFT customisations were delivered. The customisations entailed:
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Support of AWS Account requests with additional metadata
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Delegation for public Route53 zones
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Implementation of hybrid DNS resolvers
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Implementation of hub/spoke transit networking in central infra accounts
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Automatic VPC provisioning in workload accounts
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Automated transit attachments and routing
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Implementation of shared egress via transit networking
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Automated SSO permissions assignment
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Shared VPN connectivity back to on-premises
ClearPointers provided hands-on delivery for the aforementioned infrastructure setup, and also assisted TAG engineers with Terraform usage for application resources. Building on top of the foundations provided by AWS Control Tower, the team also migrated DNS zones to Route53 and built a cloud data lake. The last piece of the delivery was to design and provision cloud CI/CD pipelines for applications hosting. It was provided successfully and enabled TAG to automatically deploy their applications in a standard and automated manner.
Throughout the engagement, ClearPoint included Turners Automotive software engineers in the solution journey, upskilling them in cloud enablement in a robust, methodical way.
The Outcome
ClearPoint allowed us to leapfrog our maturity in DevSecOps. We not only deployed the initial 3 workloads but the landing zone has allowed us to expand into AWS and modern development practices at great speed.”
- Dharsh Ratnayake, Software Development Manager, Turners Automotive Group
The approach and implemented solution set up Turners Automotive Group with strong cloud foundations, enabling them to build and deploy more cloud-native applications on AWS in the future. The choice of AFT provided TAG with the advantages of Terraform-based account provisioning while allowing them to govern the AWS accounts with AWS Control Tower. By establishing automated and reliable cloud foundations, future maintenance of the AWS accounts can utilise DevOps best practices such as automation, infrastructure as code, and CICD pipelines. In result, the implemented solution is a secure AWS multi-account environment (thanks to AWS Control Tower), employing automation (thanks to Terraform and AFT), enabling TAG to reliably deploy their applications on top of the AWS accounts.
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