Client's Needs

EGlobalTech was contracted to support a federal customer with the development of a proof of concept replacement for a mission critical component that supports the alerting of the general public in times of emergency. The customer wanted to demonstrate the viability of moving this system to the Cloud to achieve great availability, scalability, and reduced costs, but was also constrained by the license costs of the middleware used in the existing system. The customer engaged EGT to reengineer the solution to utilize native AWS services and open-source software that eliminated the dependence upon the expensive middleware.

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Our Approach

Our team chose compute optimized EC2 instances for the messaging component as the flow of traffic was light and they perform many tasks which require a high CPU compute time. We used Lambda functions for the dissemination sub-systems such as alerting, workflow, data transformation, and dispatcher interfaces. This decision was based on the high fluctuation of traffic and the small footprint of the applications themselves. Being lightweight applications, we were able to show that this design, responded quickly even as the request frequency increased beyond expected operational limits. For file and object storage, we used Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and S3, respectively. Since most alert requests tend to be for the entire list of active alerts, we implemented a job to update this list of active alerts in S3 whenever new ones were posted. As a result, the Lambda function did not have to be invoked for such a simple request not requiring any compute time. We configured API Gateway to route these requests to either S3 or Lambda, depending on the type of request made by the user. For database and relational data storage, our team leveraged AWS Aurora. This allowed us to migrate all relational and transactional data with no changes to the database schema.

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Results We Delivered

The prototype was a success in proving that the customer’s mission critical system can be moved to AWS while reducing licensing and maintenance costs. We demonstrated that the middleware and database platform can be safely replaced with open-source alternatives and available AWS services, making the system architecture interoperable and flexible as requirements evolve over time. With the successful completion of this project we were able to demonstrate to the customer that an AWS deployment reduced cost and risk while improving fault tolerance, scalability, and throughput of all mission critical system services.