Managing PIM Infrastructure On AWS Cloud to optimize operational and maintenance costs

Introduction

In today’s recruitment industry, digital transformation focuses on bringing operational-level changes by significantly reducing infrastructure maintenance and seamlessly scaling the platform. To solve diverse recruitment challenges, including changing hiring needs, increased volumes of candidates, and handling virtual interviews, eTeki underwent a digital transformation by collaborating with Amzur Technologies to ensure security, scalability, and fault tolerance while optimizing cost.

Client Overview

In the recruitment industry, database management and enhanced candidate experience are imperative. eTeki – a leading online recruitment service provider, wanted to develop a video-based recruitment-as-a-service platform that can considerably save time and cost for employers and candidates.
The customer wanted to improve their Product to Market time, affected by a Product Information Management (PIM) system that was split across various platforms. They approached Amzur to build an integrated solution that promises the PIM environment on the AWS cloud platform, enabling fast end-to-end product onboarding and simpler asset management.

Challenges

The recruitment industry must deal with heaps of data and effective management. However, the traditional talent assessment and acquisition practices would take up more time and lead to a bad candidate experience.

eTeki struggled with numerous challenges including,

A poor data modeling and data storage system

Expensive & time-consuming data backup solutions

Instances running at higher capacity resulted in increased operational costs

Issues with security for managing databases & instances

Hence, the customer was looking for a strategic partner to help them build and manage their recruitment platform with customized BI reports.

Solution

The PIM environment acts as the mainstay for any interview business & Amzur was successful in helping eTeki build the PIM environment on AWS enabling fast end-to-end product onboarding and simpler asset management. Our operations include provisioning, upgrading, and managing the infrastructure for PIM AWS Accounts in all environments (TST, QA, and PROD).

Features of our solution:

Infrastructure built using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates

Adherence to IT Service Management (ITSM) practices, Security standards, and AWS best practices

Automated Deployment

Agile standards followed for Infrastructure development

Solution Highlights:

Redefined Backup Solution For Shared File System:

Amzur implemented the AWS Backup solution to define Backup Plan and retention policies

Contents protected against failures with AWS Elastic File System (EFS)

Quick restoration from backup content at a file level to provide cost savings

On-demand backups could be utilized whenever needed

Cost Optimization (Reservation & VPC Endpoints)

Amzur assessed the usage of instances deployed, downsized them, and changed to another instance to right-size the capacity

Replaced the older instance types with new instance types

Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Introduced Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoints to secure the data transfer between Amazon Elastic

Data is now transferred from EC2 to S3 over a private network of AWS

Improved performance of the PIM due to migrating to Nitro-based instances as well as cost savings

Improved Security and Automation

Proposed AWS Secrets Manager to enhance the security of the keys/secrets stored while eliminating manual effort for password management

The solution uses Key Management to enable a secure mode of communication. This method protects the secret with an encryption key from KMS and performs password rotation automatically regularly.

Automated Monitoring Reports for Resource Utilization and Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) Alarms

ML Service:

Apart from AWS cloud solutions, Amzur leveraged Machine Learning algorithms to make candidate assessment more effective.

Matching tech interviewer profiles against job requirements, recommending or suggesting a minimum of 5 best interviewers & migrating the service to cloud-based sage maker.

Developing and automating generic / custom reports required for business users to get more insights into customer engagement (BI reports)

Ensuring Quality of eTeki

We adopted a risk-based agile application testing strategy backed by shift left and shift right approach to ensure testing from the early stages of software development. Our QA team leveraged all modern testing tools like Selenium/Cucumber/Katalon with Java/Python/C#, SonarQube/SonarLint, JIRA/Redmine, and WAVE and NVIDIA to check the compatibility, responsiveness, and functionality of the eTeki application.

Our testing services improved the interviewing capacity of eTeki to 1000 interviews per month without any process disruptions.

Benefits:

Reduced Product-to-Market time from 10 days to 10 minutes

Backup duration reduced from 48 hours to 2 hours with AWS Backup service

Improved performance of the PIM due to migrating to Nitro-based instances and 50% cost savings due to the reserved instance purchase

Overall solution has given at least 85% savings per month

Conclusion:

Time is invaluable. Especially in the recruitment industry, delayed hiring and bad hires can impact project development and business growth. Hence, every company needs a tailor-made solution that can help them assess and evaluate tech resources in real time.
eTeki approached us with numerous challenges, and our AWS cloud solution helped them overcome those challenges with a customized and scalable video interviewing platform. Our solution has been helping them through live video streaming, customization, and automation of promotional as well as transaction-related emails to customers.