Aykira undertakes a large variety of consultancy work for our clients. Our mix of skills gives us the ability to tackle a range of complex technical problems that others simply cannot; we are often called in to address effectively problems left unsolved by others.

Listed below are some of the jobs which we have undertaken; this will give you a hint of the scope of what we can do.

Project: Flexible Cloud based deployment

A start-up client came to us wanting to re-architecture their systems to make better use of the Amazon cloud environment. In essence their current solution was strongly based on Windows and they were encountering serious issues in expanding their product offering effectively, as well as issues with producing mobile applications that were reliable and efficient.

We took on this project and have so far:

• Moved them from using a Mono based mobile app framework to a native set of applications. They have much finer grain control over how each app uses the per handset resources and are able to provide a much higher degree of functionality to the end user as a result. This has also enabled much innovation in how the apps keep in sync with the core database in the face of unreliable network availability.
• Moved them to utilising better the Amazon Cloud framework to provide scalability and reliability. The system architecture was changed to a per ‘tenant’ model in terms of deployment, rather than fixed share environment – this gives them the ability to offer services at different scale points according to the needs of each specific customer. This also improves the overall security aspects of the whole system, no danger of ‘cross talk’ or leakage between customer data sets, as well allowing different Quality of Service (QoS) offerings to different customers as needed.
• Set up an Administrative framework to make it easy to deploy and set up new deployments for each customer as needed. This closely integrates into Amazon, the system under deployment and their accounting system to streamline the deployment process. Everything is logged and under version control. The framework will even report key statistics on the status of the whole deployment environment and notify administrators of any changes to the live or rc environments. Deployments can be taken live, archived whole or reinstated with ease.

We also are often involved with the start-up as a key player in the technical decision making and have helped guide the start-up towards more powerful & useful solutions.

Skills Used:

• System Design & Architecture
• System Analysis
• Software Development and deployment
• 3rd party Systems integration
• CMS (Symfony), Php, MySQL & Apache.

Project: Unified Sign-on Services

A client came to us with a pressing problem, they operated many sites but were unable to have a login successfully ‘span’ across all the websites, making the user experience very fragmented. We analysed the problem and came up with an approach that would allow users to login from any website and be seen as logged in across them all. Further, the solution supported Roles and access control as to what the user could see or do per website.

Skills Used:

• Systems Design & Architecture
• System Analysis
• Software Development and deployment
• 3rd party Systems integration
• Online Security techniques
• CMS (WordPress), Php, ASP.NET & Web Services

Project: cPanel Hosting environment overhaul

A client came to us with a cPanel based hosting environment that was based on a single machine that was at the limits of its capacity. The client wanted to move to a new bigger machine with the minimum of downtime and the ability to have a ‘hot swap’ copy available, so in case of hardware failure they could operate off the backup machine and minimise the downtime of the websites they hosted.

We took on this challenging project and delivered:

• A new machine configured with a new cPanel hosting instance. Work was done to this machine to ‘beef up’ its security, particularly around the secure shell access. Also scripts were written to quickly report any failures in the RAID array as well as critical system issues.
• A hot swap machine was set up, with key systems installed to provide a ‘headless’ hosting environment by way of a backup to the live cPanel instance. Scripts were also developed to keep the backup in sync with the live machine, with a rotating backup of the live sites over a 2 month cycle.
• Setup and configured a centralised monitoring console that provide Green/Amber/Red indication of the health of all the unix machines in use.

During this project we also dealt with a few ad-hoc technical issues with the websites being hosted.

Skills Used:

• System Design
• System Analysis
• Software Development and deployment
• Security hardening, OS monitoring

If you would like to talk to us about engaging us for Systems Consultancy in Sydney, then please either call (02) 8407 8060 or use our contact form .