Before getting started with the case study of Indian Startups, let us first understand what is cloud computing and AWS? What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).
What is Datacenter?
At its simplest, a data center is a physical facility that organizations use to house their critical applications and data. A data center's design is based on a network of computing and storage resources that enable the delivery of shared applications and data. The key components of a data center design include routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems, servers, and application-delivery controllers.
What is the server?
A server is a computer program or device that provides a service to another computer program and its user, also known as the client. In a data center, the physical computer that a server program runs on is also frequently referred to as a server. That machine might be a dedicated server or it might be used for other purposes.
In the client/server programming model, a server program awaits and fulfills requests from client programs, which might be running in the same or other computers. A given application in a computer might function as a client with requests for services from other programs and as a server of requests from other programs.
Benefits of Cloud Computing:-
The cloud gives you easy access to a broad range of technologies so that you can innovate faster and build nearly anything that you can imagine. You can quickly spin up resources as you need them–from infrastructure services, such as compute, storage, and databases, to Internet of Things, machine learning, data lakes and analytics, and much more.
You can deploy technology services in a matter of minutes, and get from idea to implementation several orders of magnitude faster than before. This gives you the freedom to experiment, test new ideas to differentiate customer experiences, and transform your business.
With cloud computing, you don’t have to over-provision resources up front to handle peak levels of business activity in the future. Instead, you provision the amount of resources that you actually need. You can scale these resources up or down to instantly to grow and shrink capacity as your business needs change.
The cloud allows you to trade capital expenses (such as data centers and physical servers) for variable expenses, and only pay for IT as you consume it. Plus, the variable expenses are much lower than what you would pay to do it yourself because of the economies of scale.
- Deploy globally in minutes:-
With the cloud, you can expand to new geographic regions and deploy globally in minutes. For example, AWS has infrastructure all over the world, so you can deploy your application in multiple physical locations with just a few clicks. Putting applications in closer proximity to end users reduces latency and improves their experience.
Types of Cloud Computing:-
The three main types of cloud computing include Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service. Each type of cloud computing provides different levels of control, flexibility, and management so that you can select the right set of services for your needs.
- Infrastucture as a Service(IaaS):-
IaaS contains the basic building blocks for cloud IT. It typically provides access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. IaaS gives you the highest level of flexibility and management control over your IT resources. It is most similar to the existing IT resources with which many IT departments and developers are familiar.
- Platform as a Service(PaaS):-
PaaS removes the need for you to manage underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems) and allows you to focus on the deployment and management of your applications. This helps you be more efficient as you don’t need to worry about resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application.
SaaS provides you with a complete product that is run and managed by the service provider. In most cases, people referring to SaaS are referring to end-user applications (such as web-based email). With a SaaS offering, you don’t have to think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed. You only need to think about how you will use that particular software.
What is AWS?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully-featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.
History of AWS:-
- AWS was launched in 2002. The company wanted to sell its unused infrastructure as a service, or as an offering to customers.
- The idea was met with enthusiasm. Amazon launched its first AWS product in 2006. Four years later, in 2012, Amazon hosted a huge event focused on collecting customer input about
- AWS. The company still holds similar events, such as Reinvent, which allows customers to share feedback about AWS.
- In 2015, Amazon announced that its AWS revenue had reached $7.8 billion. Between then and 2016, AWS launched measures that helped customers migrate their services to AWS.
- Those measures, along with the public's growing appreciation of AWS's features, induced further economic growth. Amazon's revenue increased to $12.2 billion in 2016.
- Today, AWS offers customers 160 products and services. That number will likely increase, given the rate at which Amazon builds upon and tweaks AWS.
- Let us now improve our understanding on what AWS is by looking into the services of the amazon web services (AWS).
AWS is architected to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today. Our core infrastructure is built to satisfy the security requirements for the military, global banks, and other high-sensitivity organizations. This is backed by a deep set of cloud security tools, with 230 security, compliance, and governance services and features. AWS supports 90 security standards and compliance certifications, and all 117 AWS services that store customer data offer the ability to encrypt that data.
AWS has unmatched experience, maturity, reliability, security, and performance that you can depend upon for your most important applications. For over 13 years, AWS has been delivering cloud services to millions of customers around the world running a wide variety of use cases. AWS has the most operational experience, at greater scale, of any cloud provider.
Global Network of AWS Region:-
AWS has the most extensive global cloud infrastructure. No other cloud provider offers as many Regions with multiple Availability Zones connected by low latency, high throughput, and highly redundant networking. AWS has 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions around the world, and has announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. The AWS Region/Availability Zone model has been recognized by Gartner as the recommended approach for running enterprise applications that require high availability.
Gartner Research positions AWS in the Leaders quadrant of the new 2020 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services (CIPS). CIPS, in the context of this Magic Quadrant, are defined as “standardized, highly automated offerings, in which infrastructure resources (e.g., compute, networking and storage) are complemented by integrated platform services.”
How do you pay for AWS?
AWS offers you a pay-as-you-go approach for pricing for over 160 cloud services. With AWS you pay only for the individual services you need, for as long as you use them, and without requiring long-term contracts or complex licensing. AWS pricing is similar to how you pay for utilities like water and electricity.
For certain services like Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, you can invest in reserved capacity. With Reserved Instances, you can save up to 75% over equivalent on-demand capacity. When you buy Reserved Instances, the larger the upfront payment, the greater the discount
With AWS, you can get volume based discounts and realize important savings as your usage increases. For services such as S3, pricing is tiered, meaning the more you use, the less you pay per GB. AWS also gives you options to acquire services that help you address your business needs.
AWS is the number-one choice in cloud computing services for businesses across the globe. It has a presence in over 190 countries and more than 100,000 active customers. These impressive numbers evidence the platform's continual growth, with more and more businesses adopting AWS. This adoption means that people who know how to develop AWS architecture and applications have great employment opportunities.
Case Study of Indian Startups:
Gametion goes all-in on AWS and grows its daily active users by 350%, to hit 51 million
Gametion began as a passionate game development venture, a long-cherished dream of stepping into game development and publishing. The company was formed by Mr. Vikash Jaiswal in 2010, starting off with the trend of the day - flash games for computer systems. When the Android and iOS mobile operating systems arrived the digital revolution went in full thrust globally. Gaming shifted from personal computers to mobile phones and Gametion shifted its focus from flash games to developing mobile games.
Gametion's biggest breakthrough came with Ludo King in 2016. It was a digital version of the Ludo board game that created a lot of buzz since Ludo has been a famous game in Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Europe. The game went viral and crossed 300 million downloads by 2019 globally. Apart from the mega-hit Ludo King game the company has produced games like Carrom King - a digital carrom game, and Sudoku King – a world renowned Sudoku game for puzzle game lovers, with many more interesting games in production. Carrom King is gaining popularity worldwide and currently has 10 million plus active installs.
Ludo King crossed 48 crore downloads by August 2020 and became India's first and world's third most downloaded game on Google Play. Gametion successively earned ET Startup Award 2020, with recognition as a Bootstrap Champ for the entrepreneurial achievement with Ludo King. With such great incitement, Gametion is expanding and is all set to publish many more interesting games in the coming time.
Challenges:
In the year following Ludo King’s launch, and with the inclusion of the multiplayer feature that many users had been requesting for, the game had amassed an average of 50,000 concurrent users. As user numbers continued to rise, Gametion started to experience issues with managing its increased user traffic. With the third-party multiplayer networking engine (Platform as a Service Engine) that Gametion was running on, about three percent of all Ludo King matches created resulted in drop-offs. Additionally, the costs for maintaining its user base with an externally managed solution began to pile up. Amidst growing concerns of scalability, Gametion decided it was time to explore other solutions to address the challenges they were facing.
“The rapid growth of Ludo King took us all by surprise. We saw a jump in concurrent users from 50,000 to 85,000, over a couple of weeks. That was also when we started to see recurring game drop-offs with our existing engine. We realized that we needed to explore other solutions that could better cope with the surge in users,” says Vikash Jaiswal, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Gametion.
Preparedness:
In March 2020, when countries began to go into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gametion witnessed a sharper spike in user activity for Ludo King. It experienced two million downloads a day, bringing DAUs to 51 million—a three-fold increase from what it was at the end of 2019. With AWS infrastructure already in place, Gametion was well-equipped to handle the steep user growth.
“In a matter of weeks, we saw an increase in active users to nearly three times what we were seeing by the end of 2019. With the AWS infrastructure implemented, we were able to scale at speed to match this increase in traffic flow. We did start to see bottlenecks in our data storage software, but thanks to AWS, we had enough time to come up with a solution. We implemented Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka as a buffer, to lessen the burden on our data storage software,” says Clarence Pereira, Game Producer, Gametion.
In under a decade, Gametion has grown from a seven-man team to a workforce of over 70 full-time employees. Ludo King has registered 475 million downloads to date, and with its current tech stack, Gametion is confident that it will be able to provide uninterrupted services to its user base.
“We are excited to have achieved this level of popularity with our customers, but as a startup, being able to maintain this success is just as critical. Thanks to Flentas and AWS, we are better informed about digital traffic management and how to efficiently manage our IT operations. They have been an extension of our own team throughout this process, and we are prepared to handle unexpected spikes that may arise in the future,” adds Jaiswal.
With its platform for game delivery and maintenance shored up, Gametion is looking to improve other aspects of the user experience for future games. By the end of 2020, Gametion intends to release three new games and plans to stay ahead of any potential challenges that may arise—such as data security—by considering new AWS services.
AWS Services Used by Gametion:
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2):
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
- Amazon Elastic Cache for Redis
Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is a blazing fast in-memory data store that provides sub-millisecond latency to power internet-scale real-time applications. Built on open-source Redis and compatible with the Redis APIs, ElastiCache for Redis works with your Redis clients and uses the open Redis data format to store your data. Your self-managed Redis applications can work seamlessly with ElastiCache for Redis without any code changes.
Amazon Simple Storage Service(S3):
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics.
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully compliant with IPv6 as well.
Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. CloudFront is integrated with AWS – both physical locations that are directly connected to the AWS global infrastructure, as well as other AWS services.
Amazon MSK is a fully managed service that makes it easy for you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. Apache Kafka is an open-source platform for building real-time streaming data pipelines and applications. With Amazon MSK, you can use native Apache Kafka APIs to populate data lakes, stream changes to and from databases, and power machine learning and analytics applications.
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing(ELB):
Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones.
Pratilipi Improves User Experience and Gains Millions of Users with AWS.
“Today, the platform has 99.999 percent availability owing to the effectiveness of those AWS managed services.”
Startup Pratilipi is an Indian language storytelling platform that offers books, short stories, and essays in nine Indian languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, and Marathi. It is estimated that about 90 percent of Indians do not speak English and consume content in other official languages instead. The number of internet users consuming non-English content in India currently is more than 234 million, and the figure continues to grow as more people access the internet thanks to widespread connectivity and the falling price of smartphones.
The Switch from Monolithic to Microservices:
Pratilipi launched in 2015, and its CTO at the time built the platform’s single-tiered monolithic application to run on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). When Gauri Kanekar, vice president of engineering at Pratilipi, took over platform development responsibilities in 2017, she discussed with the then CTO, Prashant Gupta, the trade-offs of rewriting the application to run in a microservices architecture. The goal was to make the application more scalable and easier to develop. Kanekar ran a proof of concept (POC) for running microservices on GCP and on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“During our POCs, we found that microservices on the AWS Cloud was easier to control, and Kubernetes on AWS was more predictable,” says Kanekar. “With GCP, we had an auto-scale feature, but sometimes it behaved oddly, spinning up multiple virtual machines. It was unclear how we could specify the minimum or maximum number of virtual machines we wanted. With auto-scaling on AWS, we could specify the number very clearly.”
The Pratilipi engineering team rewrote its application code for microservices with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) as the orchestration service. Over a period of four months, the team finished the code changes, completed testing, and migrated all data from GCP to AWS.
Amazon ECS:-
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, fast, container management service that makes it easy to run, stop, and manage containers on a cluster. Your containers are defined in a task definition which you use to run individual tasks or as a service. You can run your tasks and services on a serverless infrastructure that is managed by AWS Fargate or, for more control over your infrastructure, you can run your tasks and services on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances that you manage.
Pratilipi uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to store user details as well as all published content.
Amazon RDS:-
Amazon RDS is a service which provides database connectivity through the Internet. RDS makes it very simple and easy to set-up a relational database in the cloud.
Instead of concentrating on database features, you can concentrate more on the application to provide high availability, security, and compatibility. RDS is a fully managed RDBMS service.
Platform imagery and audio are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Amazon S3 is discussed above.
Comments Kanekar,“Because Amazon RDS is a managed service, we don’t have the overhead of hiring a database administrator and allocate the saved resources towards hiring developers instead. In addition, the scalability of Amazon S3 means we can continue adding images and audio to our platform without capacity issues. Plus, we can develop our big data analytics capabilities, using Amazon S3 as a data lake.”
Pratilipi is creating a data lake on Amazon S3
to analyze user behavior and better understand how people are reacting to marketing campaigns.
Every day, Pratilipi sends out a total of six million emails to users via Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), promoting titles of books, short stories, and essays on the Pratilipi platform. It can improve the effectiveness of those emails by tailoring messaging as it understands customer behavior better.
Amazon SES:-
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable email service that enables developers to send mail from within any application. You can configure Amazon SES quickly to support several email use cases, including transactional, marketing, or mass email communications. Amazon SES's flexible IP deployment and email authentication options help drive higher deliverability and protect sender reputation, while sending analytics measure the impact of each email. With Amazon SES, you can send email securely, globally, and at scale.
Today, Amazon Kinesis captures data from user interactions on the platform and deposits the information in Amazon S3—about 40 gigabytes a day. The data is then pulled into Pratilipi’s customer relationship management and marketing systems to understand the impact of campaigns.
Amazon Kinesis:-
Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. Amazon Kinesis offers key capabilities to cost-effectively process streaming data at any scale, along with the flexibility to choose the tools that best suit the requirements of your application. With Amazon Kinesis, you can ingest real-time data such as video, audio, application logs, website clickstreams, and IoT telemetry data for machine learning, analytics, and other applications. Amazon Kinesis enables you to process and analyze data as it arrives and respond instantly instead of having to wait until all your data is collected before the processing can begin.
The engineering team also runs Amazon Athena
against log files in the data lake for daily platform performance metrics.
Amazon Athena:-
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.
CreditVidya Extends the Loan Market to Millions of Financially Excluded Indians with AWS.
CreditVidya is a startup headquartered in India whose underwriting technology is opening the country’s loans market to over 250 million financially excluded citizens. Traditionally, financial institutions have been unwilling to lend to these citizens—typically with a daily household income of between $2 and $10—because they lack collateral and a credit history. Furthermore, processing the loans, which averages about $290 per applicant, has been too costly. CreditVidya’s technology is reducing the cost of processing loans from about $2 to less than one cent while overcoming a lack of credit history or collateral by leveraging loan applicants’ digital footprints to measure their creditworthiness.
To determine creditworthiness, CreditVidya’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) platform—Medhas—leverages payment data, financial behavioral data, and device data stored on smartphones to help determine loan applicants’ ability and intent to repay loans. Medhas platform’s AI technology continuously optimizes the parameters for scoring applicants’ creditworthiness based on a growing store of loan applications. Since working with CreditVidya, lending partners—which include 55 leading banks and non-banking financial institutions in India—have seen loan approval rates increase by 25 percent and delinquency rates decrease by 33 percent.
Srikanth Gaddam, VP of IT & Security at CreditVidya, says,“Our decision-strategy engine optimizes the delinquency rates for each lender according to their appetite for risk. The information we assess is far more comprehensive than traditional application and bureau-based scorecards, so lenders can make richer policy decisions on customers, reducing overall portfolio delinquencies.”
AWS Services use by Creditvidya:-
Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior to protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data stored in Amazon S3. With the cloud, the collection and aggregation of account and network activities is simplified, but it can be time consuming for security teams to continuously analyze event log data for potential threats. With GuardDuty, you now have an intelligent and cost-effective option for continuous threat detection in AWS. The service uses machine learning, anomaly detection, and integrated threat intelligence to identify and prioritize potential threats. GuardDuty analyzes tens of billions of events across multiple AWS data sources, such as AWS CloudTrail event logs, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, and DNS logs. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, GuardDuty can be enabled with no software or hardware to deploy or maintain. By integrating with Amazon CloudWatch Events, GuardDuty alerts are actionable, easy to aggregate across multiple accounts, and straightforward to push into existing event management and workflow systems
AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting. In addition, you can use CloudTrail to detect unusual activity in your AWS accounts. These capabilities help simplify operational analysis and troubleshooting.
Amazon CloudWatch:- This service is discussed above.
AWS Inspecter:-
Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. Amazon Inspector automatically assesses applications for exposure, vulnerabilities, and deviations from best practices. After performing an assessment, Amazon Inspector produces a detailed list of security findings prioritized by level of severity. These findings can be reviewed directly or as part of detailed assessment reports which are available via the Amazon Inspector console or API.
Amazon Inspector security assessments help you check for unintended network accessibility of your Amazon EC2 instances and for vulnerabilities on those EC2 instances. Amazon Inspector assessments are offered to you as pre-defined rules packages mapped to common security best practices and vulnerability definitions. Examples of built-in rules include checking for access to your EC2 instances from the internet, remote root login being enabled, or vulnerable software versions installed. These rules are regularly updated by AWS security researchers.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud(VPS):-
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. You can use both IPv4 and IPv6 in your VPC for secure and easy access to resources and applications.
You can easily customize the network configuration of your Amazon VPC. For example, you can create a public-facing subnet for your web servers that have access to the internet. You can also place your backend systems, such as databases or application servers, in a private-facing subnet with no internet access. You can use multiple layers of security, including security groups and network access control lists, to help control access to Amazon EC2 instances in each subnet.
AWS Identity and Access Management(IAM):-
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely. Using IAM, you can create and manage AWS users and groups, and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources.
Indian startup OYO Rooms—valued at $5 billion—claims to be the third-largest hospitality company in the world. The company partners with budget hotels that standardize rooms to OYO Rooms’ specifications—down to the thickness of the mattress—and provides end-to-end technology for hotel partners to run their operations efficiently. In turn, hotel partners gain access to OYO Rooms’ software, which include an internal audit app used to audit properties and capture customer feedback, and Orbis, a BI tool used to understand demand patterns and develop offers based on these patterns. OYO Rooms also offers a property management system for partners to manage check-ins and check-outs and conduct price adjustments according to demand.
To date, around 1.1 million people visit the OYO Rooms website daily, and more than 12,000 hotels in over 500 cities across 18 countries have partnered with the company.
“Scaling our technology stack to support growth and deliver a consistent and standardized experience to guests would be extremely difficult without the scale, services, and elasticity offered by AWS.”
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
to automate deployment and provisioning.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk:-
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.
You can simply upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. At the same time, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time
It made Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS)
the main database—which currently holds 150 terabytes of data—for bookings, hotel services, accounting, and customer account information. Amazon RDS is discussed above.
The startup is currently re-architecting its application for microservices and plans to use Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) for container orchestration.
Amazon EKS:-
EKS is the best place to run Kubernetes for several reasons. First, you can choose to run your EKS clusters using AWS Fargate, which is serverless compute for containers. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design. Second, EKS is deeply integrated with services such as Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling Groups, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), providing you a seamless experience to monitor, scale, and load-balance your applications. Third, EKS integrates with AWS App Mesh and provides a Kubernetes native experience to consume service mesh features and bring rich observability, traffic controls and security features to applications. Additionally, EKS provides a scalable and highly-available control plane that runs across multiple availability zones to eliminate a single point of failure.
EKS runs upstream Kubernetes and is certified Kubernetes conformant so you can leverage all benefits of open source tooling from the community. You can also easily migrate any standard Kubernetes application to EKS without needing to refactor your code.
“The adoption of services like Amazon EKS is helping us accelerate the pace of development by optimizing costs and reducing management overhead. We expect Amazon EKS to cut infrastructure management time by 50 percent,” says Singh.
Aircel is an India mobile service provider with a strong focus on delivering innovative services to its customers. The company is a pan-India 2G operator with 3G spectrum in 13 India states. The company has won numerous awards including Voice & Data Special Leadership Recognition in the ‘Customer Service’ category at the ET Telecom Awards 2014 in India. Aircel is headquartered in Gurgaon in the state of Haryana, India.
India is one of the largest and fastest-growing smartphone markets in the world with 300 million smartphone users and more than 27.5 million devices sold in the second quarter of 2016, as reported by IDC. As a network provider competing for the millions of smartphone users in India, Aircel seeks to distinguish itself from other network providers through its portfolio of services and price plans.
As part of its portfolio of services, Aircel provides the Aircel e-money platform, which enables customers to recharge mobile data cards, pay bills, make payments, and transfer funds to any bank account. To better support continued development, Aircel wanted to migrate the Aircel e-money platform from a hosted environment to the cloud. The company also wanted to launch Aircel Backup, an Android-based mobile app which would provide customers with 2 gigabytes of free storage for files, messages, audio, and video for their mobile devices.
For both products, Aircel needed a reliable cloud infrastructure, scalable enough to traffic peaks. Crucially for Aircel, the cloud’s security would need to support regulatory guidelines for electronic wallets from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India’s central banking monetary authority. Dr. Uttam Kumar, senior general manager - IT, says, “Besides RBI compliance, scalability, and reliability, the backend IT for our apps had to be cost-effective. We wanted to avoid any management overheads. Our aim was to work with an infrastructure that enabled us to focus on product development rather than day-to-day administration and operations.”
By building the Aircel Backup app on AWS, we reduced development time by about 60%."
Dr. Uttam Kumar
Aircel looked to engage with a cloud-service provider that could deliver the requirements for the backend infrastructures of the Aircel e-money platform and Aircel Backup app. Dr. Kumar determined that Amazon Web Services (AWS) could help Aircel meet the RBI security guidelines for e-money services. “I saw that AWS Cloud had proven itself in terms of its reliability and security by other providers of electronic wallets. Furthermore, AWS offered very competitively priced storage and this made our Aircel Backup idea viable.”
Aircel began work with the AWS team along with To The New, an AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Consulting Partner, to design and build the backend infrastructure for Aircel Money. For their storage app, Aircel worked directly with the AWS team. To The New would also manage the AWS infrastructure for the Aircel e-money platform on behalf of Aircel. Says Dr. Kumar, “We followed a recommended architecture for our AWS infrastructure, which meant there were no technical issues with both solutions. It was a very smooth process when the apps went live.”
Both the Aircel e-money service and Aircel Backup app run on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. This includes the apps’ web servers and databases. Storage for the Aircel Backup app is provided via Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The company uses Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the performance of both apps and to raise an alarm if performance falls below set thresholds. It also uses AWS CloudTrail to record application programming interface (API) calls and to deliver log files.
AWS services use by Aircel :
Easy Pay Reduces Transaction Time by 58% Using AWS
In India, most households pay their bills at local neighborhood retailers. In this largely cash-based society, settling regular expenses such as utilities and public transportation has been a tedious and time-consuming task, with customers having to queue at each vendor’s manned service stations. Easy Pay provides local neighborhood shops with a point-of-sale (POS) system they can use to facilitate customers’ payments to a variety of suppliers, with over 60 service providers in its partner network. Using the POS machines, customers can quickly and easily pay bills with cash or other modes of payment, eliminating the need for middlemen or visits to various pay stations.
We believe AWS supports our exponential business growth and allows us to help everyday retailers provide a better service to their customer."
Easy Pay launched in 2016 with its own data centers, which supported up to 6,000 transactions per day per POS machine. However, there were grumblings among its customers that processing times were too long. “Our focus has always been on differentiated experiences enabled through technology,” Rahil Patel, co-founder & COO at Easy Pay, explains. “It is not only about the product or solution that we have developed, but the speed at which we serve our customers consistently, be it our retail partners or households.”
After launching, the company’s servers were plagued with unforeseen downtime, often 15 to 20 minutes at a time, which severely affected performance during peak demand periods. “Each time a server goes down, it results in business loss for us, and we cannot afford that,” Sachin Singh, VP of sales at Easy Pay, says.
In December 2016, Easy Pay began a four-month proof of concept with Amazon Web Services (AWS), migrating target workloads onto the cloud. The company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for backend processing of retail payment services. Its management was apprehensive about the change, given the existing issues with downtime and processing speed. Thus, trials were set up to see whether the Amazon EC2 servers could handle transaction volumes up to 10 times of what Easy Pay had tracked to date. It required that the new system had to be robust and highly scalable, and the AWS platform proved a perfect fit. Easy Pay also takes advantage of Elastic Load Balancing to help redirect incoming traffic across Amazon EC2 instances during spiky periods and to ensure consistent application delivery.
Elaastic Load Balancing:-
Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones. Elastic Load Balancing offers three types of load balancers that all feature the high availability, automatic scaling, and robust security necessary to make your applications fault tolerant.
Patel says, “Moving to an elastic infrastructure that can automatically enhance system performance based of demand was fabulous. We can now increase company growth without any hesitation.”
AWS Services used:
Elastic load Balancing
Amazon RDS
Founded in 2010, Chai Point is India’s largest organized chai retailer with about 100 retail stores, on-demand chai delivery services, and Internet of Things-enabled chai and coffee dispensers. The business also produces a line of snacks called Made-for-Chai. Chai Point has about 800 employees and locations in eight Indian cities: Bangalore, Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, and Chennai.
In the next two to three years, we plan to grow to at least three times the size of where we are today, and AWS offers us the scalability to support those intentions."
Amuleek Singh Bijral
To establish and grow a presence in a market where consumption of tea is about 15 times that of coffee, Chai Point needed a highly reliable, scalable infrastructure to run key business applications including a custom enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, a customer relationship management (CRM) system, and an inventory management system. Deploying an on-premises infrastructure was impractical because the business would have had to make investments based on unreliable growth forecasts, potentially leading to underutilization of server capacity.
“We had very strong ambitions to become the leader in a market that we knew was not serviced nearly as strongly as the coffee equivalent,” says Amuleek Singh Bijral, founder and chief executive officer of Chai Point. “We needed an infrastructure that could scale to support our rapid expansion. In November 2016 we added five new stores, and in December we added another seven.” The business also needed the agility to deliver innovations such as boxC.in—a cloud-based beverage service enabled by the Internet of Things–capable chai and coffee dispensers.
Chai Point determined that only a cloud-based service could meet its infrastructure requirements, and it considered a range of cloud-service providers before deciding to use Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“The momentum AWS had established in creating and launching new services, combined with the positive feedback we received about its capabilities from our own technology team, gave us the confidence to adopt AWS,” says Singh Bijral.
The business began its migration to AWS and now runs its key systems in the AWS Cloud, including its custom ERP, CRM, and inventory-management systems; its point-of-sale system known as SHARK; a centralized data aggregation and custom analytics system; and a client feedback system. Chai Point uses an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) that enables the business to isolate sensitive internal systems from the Internet and provide access to public-facing systems on the web.
By late 2016, the business was exploring how to extend its use of core AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)-and potentially take advantage of the AWS IoT platform to run boxC.in.
Chai Point’s confidence in using AWS to run SHARK, boxC.in, and its other key systems is supported by regular training and architecture reviews to help the business maximize the value of the AWS services it uses. “Our AWS solutions architect is in regular discussions with our internal technical team to provide pointers on how we can optimize areas such as security and scalability,” says Singh Bijral. “These pointers have been invaluable in helping our business achieve the best possible outcomes from our infrastructure investments.”
AWS Services used:
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NITESH THAPLIYAL
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