Flikshop uses containters on AWS to improve Agility

Executive Summary

Send Photos to Prison

Flikshop helps families stay connected with their incarcerated friends and relatives in over 2,000 jails, prisons, and juvenile facilities across the United States. To improve application scalability, availability, and operational efficiency, Flikshop partnered with ITTStar for Kubernetes migration services on AWS. By modernizing its application infrastructure with Kubernetes and AWS cloud services, Flikshop achieved automated deployments, improved scalability, reduced infrastructure costs, and zero-downtime application delivery.

Customer challenge

The Flikshop application was deployed on AWS EC2 with multiple APIs and services, creating operational complexity and deployment challenges. To overcome these issues, ITTStar implemented AWS Kubernetes infrastructure automation, enabling container orchestration, automated deployments, secure configuration management, and simplified infrastructure operations while improving application reliability and scalability.

Partner Solution

ITTStar designed and implemented a Kubernetes-based cloud platform using Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon Route 53. By integrating Kubernetes autoscaling and container management, self-healing pods, and cloud-native infrastructure, the new platform minimized downtime, improved application resilience, and ensured uninterrupted service availability during deployments and upgrades.

Why AWS?

The client was already using AWS Cloud. ITTStar modernized the deployment architecture by implementing Kubernetes microservices, Jenkins pipelines, and DevOps CI/CD automation services. Automated deployments, infrastructure monitoring with Prometheus and K8s Lens, and Kubernetes orchestration significantly reduced deployment time, optimized infrastructure costs, and enabled zero-downtime application releases.

Why Flikshop chose ITTStar?

ITTStar has previous experience working on similar implementations that combine our strong skill sets around DevOps and excellent customer support. We were able to satisfy our customer’s needs through our extensive experience, solid processes, and vital customer service. We provided our client with a smoother transition to a new platform on Kubernetes with autoscaling configured and monitoring by implementing all the requirements they asked for.

Impact & Result

ITTStar's unique solution transformed Impresari’s business functioning in the following ways:

• Flexibility - ITTStar automated this previously manual process by using CI/CD (Jenkins) and configured K8s-lens and Prometheus for monitoring. With this automated process, there is zero downtime.
• Scalability - We enabled horizontal Pod autoscaling in Kubernetes in the new solution.
• Cost Reduction - The client initially used 27 instances for the 27 APIs. ITTStar deployed each API as a micro-service and then deployed them in the K8s with 5 nodes to reduce the initial cost by 3/4th.
• Security & Resilience - We ran instances in a private subnet, controlled network access to the instances, and configured HPA for better security and resilience.