Amazon Web Services has Changed the Game When it Comes to IT Infrastructure

Amit Vora, Founder and CEO, Living Consumer Products Pvt. Ltd. (iCrushiFlush)

Amit Vora, Founder and CEO, Living Consumer Products Pvt. Ltd. (iCrushiFlush)

In this age of fast, light, data-intensive, internet-driven products and platforms, it is impossible to think of running businesses without using cloud technology. As a technologist for the better part of two decades, I have seen the rapid shift from hosted architecture to cloud based systems and the rate of adoption has only increased exponentially, as CTOs and even CEOs, CFOs & even CSOs have completely bought into the benefits and potential cloud-based architecture.

As CEO & CTO of Living Consumer Products (started in 2014), I had no doubts to start off with cloud-based services, namely on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We, at Living Consumer Products cater to both kind of audiences, we engage directly with end-users through our casual dating and connect mobile app – iCrushiFlush, while we also built an AI-driven digital marketing platform – XENA – which aids us to provide brilliant marketing services to brands and companies. In less than 3 years of its existence, iCrushiFlush has signed up over five million users, with over 750,000 being active daily. With over 20 million transactions happening every day, there was no question about using hosted systems. Our digital marketing service platform XENA is driven by neural networks, where we use data to understand engagement trends, creative analysis, consumer behavior patterns and show the right set of Ads through the appropriate channel to deliver maximum return on marketing investment (ROI). This involves intense computations to decide near real-time which channel to spend on before it plateaus with regards to acquisitions and achieving optimal yield.

Running an organization with such diverse products and requirements is possible only because of the advent of cloud-based services, where technology has become simpler, faster and economical. If organizations still use local compute and storage, GOD save their future.

In this space, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has really changed the game when it comes to IT infrastructure and has been the catalyst for the tremendous growth in the mobile and internet space along with the multifold growth in various tech startups providing cutting edge solutions. You can develop an application and launch the same in minutes rather waiting for your procurement guy to wait up for the physical machine in your server rooms. AWS has been at the forefront of cloud-based services and you can see their contribution to the growth of the technology industry over the past two decades. The flexibility of the AWS solution enables you to develop applications on multiple platforms and programming modules, on top of it they have been adding more and more services which helps one to launch their application as soon as possible.

AWS has been at the forefront of cloud-based services and you can see their contribution to the growth of the technology industry over the past two decades

Usually cloud-based services are associated with compute and storage, but AWS has added some great services which every organization, big or small must look into and implement them, if not being done already. Services such as Relational Database Services (RDS), Amazon Machine Images (AMI), Domain Name Space mapping (Route 53) are highly recommended rather than creating your own instance and installing software for these services. Personally, I am a huge proponent of RDS and have utilized it across all my engagements as it is highly secure and scalable. Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) is another service which I highly recommend being used. I would suggest managers to use this service instead of using third party SSL certificates to make their websites and applications much more secure than HTTPS. Managers must also secure all their resources on AWS using the IAM module, as it secures the access to AWS resources for applications that run on Amazon EC2. It helps to give granular level permission to resources. Also, CloudWatch alarms are very important to monitor the availability of resources especially during starvation mode.

Beyond the above preferred services, if anyone intends to use an instance/server for a long period, I would suggest they rather go for a “reserved instance” instead of “on-demand instance”. This will help in reducing the costs drastically. Also, we should open only certain ports to certain groups or IP addresses in our security policy groups. This is a very critical thing to do with regards to security and will help keep hackers out.

Finally, it also is extremely imperative to take backups regularly. AWS provides option to take backups by taking snapshot of instances in console. Backup schedules can also be defined and automatically deployed with services such as Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Lambda. Further we should use Lambda functions to cost optimize our servers, like for example, we can stop staging servers when not in use (beyond office hours). AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets us run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda can be used to run our code in response to events.

The above were some key services and important points to note while engaging with AWS in particular, but also for any other cloud-based service. But we also need to keep certain critical things in mind while doing so. Never assume that every instance you create over AWS is safe and secured, take appropriate measures to make it secured like IAM services. Also, one should avoid using dynamic IP addresses on the servers, and instead go for Elastic IP. Whenever a server instance is created, dynamic IP addresses are set as default, but then this causes problems when we restart the servers, and results in application failures. Instead one must use Elastic IP service, which lets us use static IPs for our servers. For content delivery, we can use CloudFront, although Akamai provides much better content delivery network services and is a much more tried and tested solution.

Also, we should not spend much time developing deployment scripts for simple applications, where we can easily use Elastic Beanstalk and CodeDeploy instead. Elastic Beanstalk helps you to quickly deploy and manage applications on the AWS Cloud without worrying about the infrastructure that runs those applications. AWS CodeDeploy is a deployment service that automates application deployments to Amazon EC2 instances, on-premises instances, or serverless Lambda functions.

To conclude, the flexibility of the pay-as-you go model and cost savings resulting from cloud computing is a crucial competitive advantage to the companies who use AWS because it allows the company to focus on innovation and time-to-market.