Design and implementation of AWS cloud environment for Droids on Roids mobile application

Droids On Roids is a Polish software company providing native and cross-platform applications for startups and enterprises. To date, the company has worked with brands such as Walt Disney, CCC, LiveChat, NCC, Giphy Cam and Safesize.

For Droids on Roids, we prepared infrastructure to support an application developed for a large FMCG client, the purpose of which was to support a loyalty promotion for the brand's customers. At the time of the cooperation, the client already had a ready-made application built on containers, and its test version was running on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Our role was to create a target infrastructure that would support the application, regardless of the scale of traffic generated.

Infrastructure

One of the goals of the project was to prepare two identical environments - test and production. Therefore, we decided to use the IaC (Infrastructure as Code) approach, building the entire infrastructure using the Terraform tool, which significantly accelerated the entire process of preparing both environments. We designed the infrastructure with full HA (High Availability) of services in mind.

We proposed to the Client to deploy the application on Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service), which allows it to scale and is characterized by the so-called low administrative overhead, allowing developers to focus on creating and implementing new application functionalities.

At the time of the cooperation, the client already had a self-built CI/CD process, which was based on the Semaphor tool. Our task was to migrate it to GitHub Actions along with adapting it to the new infrastructure, i.e. adding automatic deployment to Amazon ECS.

To secure the environment, we routed all traffic to applications through AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall), while we used Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) to send internal PUSH notifications. Due to automatic resource scaling, we used AWS Load Balancer for efficient traffic distribution. The promotion landing page was built on AWS S3 and Cloudfront services. We ran the database for the application on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL service.

Performance tests

Due to the fact that the promotion for which the application was created was just taking off, it was hard to predict the traffic it would have to handle. As a result, everything within Amazon ECS had to scale according to the current load. Once the infrastructure was completed, we prepared more than a dozen complex scenarios together with the client, according to which we conducted performance tests. The result of the tests was an indication of the optimal configuration of the environment (CPU and RAM vs. resource costs), as well as a number of hints on the possibility of implementing improvements on the application side. Once the bottlenecks were eliminated, we ran repeated tests on the selected configuration, which confirmed the selection of the optimal environment, both in terms of performance and cost.

Summary

For Droids on Roids, we prepared a high-performance and auto-scaling environment in HA for a mobile application, based on Amazon ECS. We migrated and expanded the CI/CD pipeline, and performed a series of performance tests that allowed us to achieve optimal performance of the environment and application. The whole process took us less than a month, and the environment we prepared without failure supports the operation of the application regardless of the traffic generated. At the very end, we trained the Droids on Roids team in the basic operation of the infrastructure and in solving the most common potential problems. The best confirmation of satisfaction with cooperation with us are the next orders, which, when completed, we hope to describe for you as well.

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