ValidSoft Limited - Biometric Software
Migrate to AWS with Elastic Container Service (ECS)
Validsfot.com ValidSoft secures transactions with services that are incredibly simple for the user. ValidSoft remove the need for PINs, passwords, and security questions. Built around voice biometrics, multi-factor authentication protects Online, Smartphone, Card and Telephone transactions. ValidSoft work in the Enterprise, Financial Services and Government sectors.
Phase 2 of the workstream was to migrate the Windows workloads from colo to AWS
Customer Challenges
This work is planned to be delivered on multiple phases.
ValidSoft, unexpected business growth, increased the needed to expand additional biometrics product services and expanding their hosting to use other AWS Services
Cutomer has been experiencing recurring service availability problems with their previous cloud provider, causing significant operational disruption and hampering their ability to serve their customers effectively.
As a result, they were looking for a reliable and scalable solution capable of ensuring high availability and optimal uptime for their services.
ValidSoft core business directly depends upon its core biometric backend which is hosted on premise. Few minutes of downtime translates into direct loss of customers impacts.
1- Frequent downtimes during load on their on premise hosting.
2. Unable to match access on physical Windows Domain Controls.
3. Unable to scale database for shorter duration due to licensing issues and hardware unavailability.
4. Uneven traffic distributed usage will be high only during admissions & results, infrastructure agility most imperative component on the expected solutions – Scaling up more servers during admissions & scaling down after the admissions are over
This included the different system tiers in order to maintain both the end user experience and integration with the different marketplaces.
Our Solution
CloudiQS Enterprise Cloud Architects worked with the Validsoft infra team to migrate their core biometric backend MS SQL Server (Data Bases ) on AWS and keeping in mind for the cost, scalability & security.
The proposed solution will enable ValidSoft to scale from a minimal-set of users-to thousands at any given time. To accomplish this, requirement, the solution was implemented using services such as AWS Autoscale , AWS EC2 Windows Servers, AWS Elastic Load balancer and AWS S3, and creating a Microsoft SQL Server Across 3 availability zones
- Migrate infrastructure composed by more than 175 microservices:
- Workload: ensure all applications run smoothly in containers
- Migrate data including databases, redis and Elastic Search, with minimal impact on services’ uptime.
- Set seamless Automated deployment workflows (CI CD) for infrastructure and applications
- Manage all the infrastructure with Infrastructure-as-code tool (Terraform).
- Implement best practices related to AWS, DevOps and security.
- Ensure cost control : optimizing infrastructure for efficiency.
- A highly scalable and available web architecture was proposed on AWS for this workload.
● Application was designed using core Windows language such C++ and .Net with Dependencies to windows Active Directory Services
● AWS Auto Scaling will manage un Healthy EC2instances. AWS Auto Scaling will ensure minimum EC2 instances are always running, subject to traffic demand, or in event of failure , new instances will be launched within seconds automatically.
● To ensure on high availability the image of the application server has been launched in another availability zone to make sure the application availability if any disaster or a primary Availability Zone goes down.
● MS SQL Server ( hosted on Ec2) and user access control setup through Windows Active Directory and for authentication feature of Windows AD Service.
● Buffer pool extension implementation across all MS SQL DB on windows EC2 to address high memory utilisation issue, using Provisioned IOPS dedicated EBS volume used as BPE (Buffer pool extension drive).
● All SQL Db EC2 Servers integrated with Cloudwatch and AWS SNS via AWS CLI in SQL job to trigger failure alerts to subscribed recipients in all windows SQL ec2.
The Results
● A proof-of-concept with ECS: We validated the feasibility of containerizing and deploying ChargeMap’s applications on AWS using Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS).
- MS SQL server with almost 10000 IOPS running on latest hardware has been performing seamlessly without any downtime.
● Servers could handle a consistent load of over 20000 to 25000 sessions without any downtime.
● Biometric application backend performance was maintained as Core and RAM usage was maintained below 80% due to Auto Scale.
● Infrastructure cost was reduced to 1/10th of what was originally expected by the customer since scalability and monitoring were automated multiple proactive steps were taken for hassle-free business continuity.
● Automated deployment for SQL Server 2019 Enterprise edition running on Windows Server 2019.
● AWS Systems Manager Automation, AWS Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) we used to deploy a multi-node SQL Always On availability group with database replication
● Integrated AWS CLI in SQL job to take differential and a full backup to S3 on all windows SQL EC2 Servers
Architecture Overview
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