CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

The Challenge:

Scaling to meet the demand, but with uncertainty around when and how much this demand will be – they are very concerned about buying too much infrastructure too soon or not enough too late!

Manage user identities & sync user specific data across multiple devices

Ability for Service Providers to send notifications to consumer

Ability to run analytics on top of collected data, with analytics they should be able to visualize & understand app data usage

Their ability to configure their database and data access layer for high performance and throughput

Effective distribution of load

A self-healing infrastructure that recovers from failed service instances

Security of data at rest and in transit

Securing access to the environment as the delivery team expands

An archival strategy for inactive objects greater than 6 months

Ability to easily manage and replicate multiple environments based on their blueprint architecture

Solution:
Upon completion of brainstorming session with Application design architects on understanding the developmental activities for the new Web and mobile Application for LogiFlex, following AWS Design principles were applied and corresponding AWS Services were utilized to hosting the On-Demand, more secured and self-healing infrastructure for UflexIT new Application.

Design principles and AWS Services

Loose Coupling:
Loosely coupled solution was designed using ECS to run isolated application services in Docker containers which are more flexible and Cost-effective services.
Scalability:
Auto-scaling features being used in both ECS host and application services hosted in containers which will allow upscale the infra services based on the demand.
High Availability (Self-Healing):
Application load balancer, Autoscaling, Cloudwatch alerts and Route 53 services being used to provide highest level of service uptime for the application services.
Security:
Along with IAM, client-side encryption is being used to protect data in transit and rest for S3 buckets and aurora db instances using AWS KMS service. Also we have utilized SSL/TLS certificates for protecting data in transit for S3 and public facing Application load balancers.
Cost Containment:
Right sizing is the instance types is one of the main factor which decides the cost and Right sizing environments or instances is not an exact science and it is a continual balance between performance and cost which consists of a PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) style of continuous improvement and rightsizing of operating instances. Once the application gets matured and through the benchmark reports, we planed for Reserved instances which offers up to 20% discount per instance.
AWS Users management:
AWS IAM enables centralisation of user accounts across various Global and Regional AWS instances and allow the ability to create and manage AWS users and groups and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources. Complex passwords of at least 8 characters, including special characters being enforced. Some Users will be required to use Multi-Factor Authentication leveraging AWS MFA when logging in.
Monitoring and analytics:
Along with Cloudwatch, AWS Elastic search, Kibana and Logstash, open source tools being used to provide granular dashboards which allows to run custom queries based on the requirements.
Automation:
Lambda Scheduled Events to contain the unauthorised resource deployment and CloudFormation also known as IAC being used to deploy AWS infrastructure. CI/CD tool like codebuild and code deploy has been considered to automate the source code deployment on to the containers.
Database:
AWS Aurora (MySQL compatible) a fully manageable relational database built for the cloud has been considered in this design for its increased speed and throughput then the legacy db. It automatically grows its disk space up to 64TB by the 10GB chunk space without the prior cost investment
User data(profile) synchronization:
Amazon Cognito to Sync Data between the multiple devices is being utilized.

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