How Teracloud helped
to optimize the traffic handling and
ensure the availability of its platform
MindSmack is a 23 year old digital agency that provides weekly maintenance and support services to the platform of hundreds of companies around the world. One great use case to mention is on the subject of advertising. Every month they blast out niche advertising campaigns for clients. These media blitzes are always focused on the user's geographical area of interest. This action compromised site performance when an update on Apple devices set the automatic opening of incoming emails. The enormous flow of simultaneous queries to the DB affected operations not related to events.
About MindSmack
MindSmack specializes in the highest level of interactive web design, marketing design, video game design/development, 3D modeling, commercial animation, advertising design, iPhone/Android app design/development, mixed reality, AR and VR experiences.
“We create award winning websites, apps, video games for any platform, advertising design, animation of any kind, motion graphics, digital displays, AR/VR experiences and anything else you see on a screen. We also recently launched the world’s best live-video streaming platform called StreamVoodoo” - Marcelo Moyano CXO
MindSmack's Challenges
Monthly, the platform sends out various ads to its subscribers usually including an offer and a discount. The number of people who receive these emails is well into the millions. Furthermore, the vast majority of them are users of Apple devices.
In an update, Apple enabled by default the review of incoming emails in order to do security scans. This motivated the opening of millions of emails simultaneously, negatively impacting the platform's functionality due to the congestion in the DB due to the massive queries.
The challenge then was to separate query handling from the rest of the application, to allow usability of the site and eliminate DB congestion.
Why AWS
These clients already have their entire platforms deployed on AWS, therefore they are aware of the advantages of using this technology. They sought to obtain a solution that would also allow a secure, highly available, good-performance, robust, and secure API. With an instance dedicated exclusively to reading, Redis to reduce accesses to the DB and an ECS cluster mounted on EC2 to ensure high availability.
Why Teracloud
MindSmack wanted to have an experienced AWS partner with a strong background on high capabilities to build a secure, scalable, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. Teracloud has shown these capabilities on past projects, and also implementation speed on similar initiatives.
Partner Solution
Following the AWS Well-Architected framework we have designed and implemented a solution that includes the 5 pillars. Security, Reliability, Performance, Operational Excellence and Cost-effectiveness are part of this proposal.
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PCI compliant design
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Architecture based on containers under AWS ECS
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Continuous Integration and Delivery using CodeBuild and CodePipelines to automate
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Infrastructure as a Code using Terraform
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Secure and reliable data stores with AWS RDS read-replica with MultiAZ and Multi-layer design.
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Monitoring and visibility enabled by CloudWatch and notifications via slack channel
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Separation of concerns and high availability at the VPC level with multilayer design, most appropriate for the sensibility of the financial services industry.
Results and Benefits
By creating an ECS cluster adaptive to changes in traffic and separating the DB read to a specific instance, the application ensured that it continued to provide availability and efficient operation while a large amount of traffic coming from the email campaign was appropriately handled according to demand.
In this graph, we are able to see how our solution impacts product performance, remedying the traffic congestion in the main database.
And to check how the solution follows the incoming demand, we see how the desired capacity in the Autoscaling group varies following the increase in the Db connections
Even further, we can see how the system responds, without degradations.
Next Steps
MindSmack continues growing and requires more resources to support and optimize this expansion. The excellent experience of working with Teracloud as an AWS advanced partner with certified professionals boosts MindSmack’s productivity and performance, extending these benefits to its own customers.
In the future, MindSmack is extending Teracloud’s involvement in
the design, development, and maintenance of new infrastructure
in MindSmack’s ecosystem.
Teracloud’s expertise in security and also the experience in helping all kinds of companies to scale their business in a healthy and efficient way was crucial in their decision.
Some examples of this, which we have already implemented:
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Maturity security Model Report
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Enable AWS Organization and SSO to ensure environments isolation and manage user access and permissions more easily
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Creation of alarms and monitoring dashboards
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Implementation of Billing alarm
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Creation of a new CDN
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Enable Cloudfront Logs for the principals CDNs
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Automate security threat detection
Our approach
Teracloud is a fast-growing AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner created by certified cloud experts, with seasoned experience in migrating and deploying startups, enterprises, and everything in between to the cloud. We've worked with companies from many industries such as airlines, healthcare, education, and e-commerce designing, implementing, and managing Cloud workloads with HA architecture under 99.9% uptime SLA and PCI/HIPAA compliance requirements.
Our expertise ranges from designing state-of-the-art cloud architecture to deploying and managing cloud environments through Managed Services including AWS Consulting, Architects, DevOps, DevSecOps, MLOps, 24/7 Support, Automation, Disaster Recovery, and Security. We provide secure, scalable, and highly available solutions for our clients.
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