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Achieved high availability and scalability through cloud migration and improved customer experience

Services Offered: App Modernization

Industry: Events / Social Media

Introduction

To manage customer information and deliver a personalized experience, Amzur Technologies developed a cloud-native solution to migrate Unation’s Monolithic application to Microservices on the AWS platform. We modernized the existing Customer Information Management (CIM) system to help Unation reduce the deployment time and improve the load balancing to handle the global traffic. The serverless architecture helped Unation with better flexibility and agility while utilizing resources at a low cost.

Client Overview

unation
In the entertainment industry, managing business on monolithic applications doesn’t guarantee scalability and real-time data management. Unation is a US-based event booking platform provider serving millions of customers across the globe. For a better and personalized customer experience, they wanted their monolithic application on the cloud to handle its operations effectively and efficiently.

They approached Amzur to develop a cloud-native AWS platform for customer information management, eliminate tedious manual tasks and handle a few unforeseen downtimes.

Challenges

In the fast-paced and competitive market, staying relevant is the need of the hour. Therefore, relying on monolithic applications in the technology-dominated era could be the biggest hindrance to growth. Frequent downtimes, expensive maintenance, and resistance to technology adoption will make any business extinct.

Here are a few challenges Unation faced with the monolithic applications:

Extensive, monolithic application with reliability and performance issues.

Large blast radius due to the tightly coupled architecture, where an issue in one component could take down the entire system.

Dependency on costly, third-party licensed applications.

More downtime due to the increase in maintenance cycles.

Tedious manual deployments for new-feature releases.

Hence, the client was looking for a cloud solution partner to help them migrate their application to the AWS cloud with improved security and scalability.

Solution

For Unation, information management and security are crucial. For that, we’ve implemented VPN tunnels to secure connections between the on-premises data center and AWS cloud. Our team created multiple private subnets to host applications with no open internet endpoint and reduced the blast radius for unforeseen security incidents. A network access control list (network ACL) acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out at the subnet level.

To satisfy audit and compliance needs, the team configured AWS CloudTrail, which provides the event history of AWS account activity. Reducing the deployment time was another crucial pain point that had to be addressed, and Amzur used an automated CI/CD pipeline to mitigate that. To set up the CI/CD pipeline, the team used Jenkins for continuous integration and deployment.

AWS Services:

The following AWS services and features now host components of Unation:

AWS VPN establishes a secure and private tunnel from the on-premises data center to the AWS global network.

Amazon Route 53 is a Domain Name Server (DNS), which routes global traffic to the application using Elastic Load Balancing.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) sets up a logically isolated, virtual network where the application can run securely.

Application Load Balancer is a product of Elastic Load Balancing, which load balances HTTP/HTTPS applications and uses layer 7-specific features, like port and URL prefix routing for containerized applications.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a container orchestration service that supports Docker containers to run and scale containerized applications on AWS.

AWS Fargate is a compute engine for Amazon ECS that allows running containers without having to manage servers or clusters. Microservices are deployed as Docker containers in the Fargate serverless model.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is integrated with Amazon ECS as a fully-managed Docker container registry that makes it easy to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images. This is used as a private repository to host built-in Docker images.

Amazon Aurora is a relational database compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, used as a database for the CIM platform migration.

AWS DMS migrates on-premises Oracle databases to cloud-native Aurora databases.

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and management service used to monitor the entire CIM platform and store application logs for analysis.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides the computing capacity in the cloud and was used to host Jenkins and JFrog Artifactory as a container for the CI/CD pipeline.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) manages access to AWS services and resources securely.

Security and Compliance:

VPN tunnels are used between the on-premises data center and AWS cloud to improve security.

Our team created multiple private subnets to host applications with no open internet endpoint, and reduced the blast radius for any unforeseen security incidents.

VPC security groups were configured to restrict port and protocol access for corporate networks only at the instance level.

An additional layer of network security rule added using the network access control list (network ACL) acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out at the subnet level.

The databases and Docker containers are hosted in private subnets and deployed across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) for high availability.

To satisfy audit and compliance needs, the team configured AWS CloudTrail, which provides the event history of AWS account activity. The activity includes actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS Software Development Kits (SDK).

Migration and Containerization:
Our team decoupled the new architecture into the following services:

CIM service stores fetch and update customer information.

The customer information bridge service connects the on-premises database to the CIM service, which was built on the cloud-native database Aurora PostgreSQL.

Search indexes customer information for easier record retrieval.

Customer identification service integrates the third-party customer identification system to verify unique, government-issued identities.

Subscription service fetches customer subscriptions.

Device service fetches customer device information.

Value Delivered to Unation

Creating a serverless architecture provides a true cloud-native architecture for Unation with high availability and less downtime.

Our AWS serverless architecture ensured high availability and scalability for Unation and loosely coupled architecture with microservices reduces the blast radius and provides the ability to scale each component independently.

We improved Unation’s network security using Amazon VPC and restricted unauthorized access using security groups and network ACLs.

The containerized CI/CD pipeline helped Unation achieve Zero downtime during application development, deployment, and maintenance. With AWS DMS, we migrated on-premises databases to cloud-native databases like Amazon Aurora and accelerated the overall migration process.

Conclusion

In the current customer-driven era, personalized customer experience is crucial. For Unation, the major concerns are maintaining applications on-premises, scalability, and security. So, they planned to develop a serverless architecture that allows them to scale their business with enhanced security and less manual intervention.

They approached us with numerous challenges that kept them awake at night for years. Our team of AWS cloud developers and architects have helped Unation overcome those challenges by offering backend-as-a-service (BaaS) and cloud-native databases like Amazon Aurora and accelerating the overall migration process. With our solution, Unation could handle traffic around the globe and manage customer information effectively.

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