About Crowd Funding Platform

Asia’s largest crowdfunding platform helps to raise funds for a wide variety of individual, corporate’s or NGO’s. It provides an online platform to help people who do not have means to pay for  life threatening diseases , innovative ideas , social causes etc. The idea of platform was brain stormed at a TED conference, which grew on to become a revolution.

The Challenge

Since its founding in 2012, It has quickly become a very popular crowdfunding platform. To respond to it’s ever-increasing customer base, the company knew it had to invest in the underlying technology so that it will be scalable. “Security, Availability, Performance Scalability” are major challenges of any business’s in today’s world. To solve these challenges IntellyZen proposed a Solution where in these quality attributes are taken care of and also the infrastructure is more easier to manage and maintain.

These were the high level challenges faced by Crowd Funding Platform:

• Performance and Scalability were a major bottleneck in their quest of reaching their ultimate goal of becoming the leaders in global crowdfunding platform.
• Latency issues coupled with frequent server issues.
• No provision of backup and retention policy for the servers.
• Provisioning of a DR setup was missing.
• Least privilege access was not implemented.
• No Logging & Monitoring of KPI’s for Production Server’s and Services

The Solution

Flentas  proposed to help optimize and monitor their serverless infrastructure and also setup release management to cut release times.

• Continuous monitoring of CPU Utilization, Memory and Disk Space Utilzation of all their AWS services set across multiple regions using AWS CloudWatch and alerting the team members by sending SNS notifications.
• Established domain name health checks using Route53 and API health checks.
• Removed unused and unwanted services that were incurring cost per month.
• Security hardening by moving instances to private network so that they are safe and secure.
• IAM password policy, MFA on all IAM Users /Root Account
• Implemented AWS X-Ray to track and monitor API request time so that it can be optimized.
• AWS Lambda Scripts for Daily, weekly and monthly backups of all production EC2 instances alongwith rentention.
• Setup a complete DR provisioning solution. Here have used AWS CloudFormation stack that will create the whole DR infrastructure.
• Release Management process is leveraged by using native AWS DevOps Services like AWS CodeCommit for managing code, AWS CodeBuild for managing for managing builds at scale and AWS CloudFormation to manage the deployments.

The Benefits

• Less management and maintainence of the serverless architecture enabled to deploy services faster and thus they could focus on innovating ideas to help their crowdfunding platform grow.
• Leveraged the CloudWatch Logs by detecting ERROR logs AWS Lambda and sending ERROR log by email’s with integration of SES
• The developer-friendly ecosystem of AWS helped them transition to the new environment very quickly and efficiently without much difficulty.
• Migrating to latest generation(AWS Nitro System) instance types which results in better overall performance of the server whilst having cost optimization , increased security on all servers.
• Lift and Shift of their Production servers to a more secure private network and having a NAT Gateway attached so the production server’s are secure and also can interact with the internetwork
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) monitored in a single CloudWatch Dashboard with appropriate markers to help in detecting anomalies and study any kind of irregular spikes in respective production AWS services.
• 24x7 support provided to the organization to help them resolve their production issues as soon as they are detected so as to have maximum uptime.
• In the future they also wish to have more AWS managed services like AWS DynamoDB, AWS CloudSearch, AWS Aurora Serverless so that the maintenance of servers is completely disregarded and their primary aim of customer satisfaction is fulfilled.