• Building a fault-tolerant infrastructure
• Fast and flexible scaling of resources for new business projects
• Reliable protection of company data from any external threats
• Leveling rapid, avalanche-like loads on resources, saving costs on servers

Results

1. Solving the problem of spontaneous heavy loads on the front-end systems during mass client connections
2. Flexible scaling of information resources, both towards increasing and decreasing the use of AWS resources
3. Rapid deployment of a test environment, which helps speed up the process of testing new solutions
4. Significant company savings using AWS spot resources and autoscaling technology.

Description

Prerequisites for migrating TAS Link to the Amazon Web Services cloud

Back in the fall of 2021, TAS Link decided to deploy infrastructure in the cloud. The company's plans included launching new business projects, and the client base of already working solutions was growing rapidly. This required fast and flexible provisioning of resources, ensuring high levels of availability and scaling of services.

The risk of large-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine has begun to grow in the country, and a new problem is emerging - ensuring the resiliency and survival of companies in a possible time of emergency and disaster. It is generally accepted that reliable protection of information resources and data from external threats and attacks is only possible with cloud services.

After a pilot was conducted at the end of 2021, the construction of a backup site based on AWS resources was planned for 2022, but after February 24, 2022, the implementation of the project had to be accelerated and the time frame for creating a backup site had to be reduced to 4 months. This was followed by a question about the speed of resuming the company’s services based on AWS resources. Thanks to the AWS free support period, a project was initiated to create a productive environment for delivering company services based on AWS resources.

The goal of the project was to transfer all the company’s services to AWS resources and build a “seamless” architecture for migrating the company’s services between the AWS cloud and the company’s server infrastructure. Thanks to the participation of specialists from Softprom and Amazon, an optimal solution architecture was developed and the necessary AWS services and instances were selected for deploying the server infrastructure in the cloud. The project was planned to be implemented within nine months. AWS services were used in the project: Route 53, Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Elastic Container Service (ECS), Shield Advanced, Simple Storage Service (S3), Simple Notification Service (SNS), Single Sign-On (SSO), EC2 -Instances, Lambda, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

AWS solutions had strong competitive advantages for project implementation

When choosing a cloud platform, TAS Link selected several popular solutions for a more detailed review. These were the most developed and widespread services on the market at that time.

The choice of solution was made on the basis of a SWOT analysis carried out according to the main criteria for evaluation:

• number and flexibility in choosing types of instances for server infrastructure
• number of paid and free services
• support for OS used by the company
• availability and development of scaling technologies
• reviews from experts and companies that have already used certain platforms
• price.

As a result of a detailed study of the capabilities of each of these solutions, TAS Link chose the AWS cloud platform (Amazon Web Services), which showed the best result of the SWOT analysis.

Thanks to the cooperation of the company’s specialists with experts from Softprom and AWS, not a single byte of data was lost during the migration, everything happened within the planned service windows, errors that occurred were resolved quickly and without downtime of business services.

Key mlestones of the TAS Link migration project to the AWS cloud

The project consisted of three key stages:

1. Analysis of current infrastructure
2. Development of cloud solution architecture
3. Piloting and sequential migration of first e-commerce systems, then processing center systems.

Advantages of AWS over standard IT infrastructure

TAS Link had no experience using cloud resources before AWS. After 2 years of working in the AWS cloud, company specialists highlight the following main advantages over standard IT infrastructure:

• flexible and fast scaling of resource use
• high level of performance and availability of AWS server infrastructure
• high level of security and fault tolerance for using AWS resources "by default"
• less burden on IT staff
• no need to support server and business infrastructure of DC servers, network equipment, security equipment, cooling systems and power supply.
• there is no need for large capital investments to purchase new or update existing server and business infrastructure equipment
• the ability to optimize costs for using server resources depending on business needs.

AWS services that use TAS Link

As of Fall 2023, TAS Link is actively using the following AWS services:

• Shield Advanced – to ensure comprehensive security of the company’s information resources hosted on AWS from various types of attacks and threats (multi-vector DDoS attacks, SQL injections, etc.)
• Autoscaling is a sharp, dynamic increase/decrease (depending on the load) of available information resources to ensure high availability of company services for external clients and partners
• SSO and MFA – for secure and easy access for administrators to manage information resources in AWS
• VPC – for building secure channels for information exchange both between internal services located outside the AWS environment, and between company services provided externally to the company’s clients and partners.

We are completely satisfied with the result of the project. We managed to build a flexible, scalable and service-oriented IT infrastructure, with a high level of availability, fault tolerance and security of use of the company’s information resources.

Future plans for TAS Link LLC to expand AWS services

The company has successfully tested the use of autoscaling AWS ECR containers and AWS ECR (Amazon Elastic Container Registry) containers, which will significantly increase the speed of scaling the availability of information resources and improve the efficiency of using AWS resources.

It is planned to introduce the use of Terraform AWS modules to deploy and make changes to the company's IT infrastructure in AWS.

Softprom — Advanced Consulting Partner on the Amazon Web Services network. Has MAP (Migration Acceleration Program) status as an AWS partner and carries out infrastructure migration projects to the cloud for Enterprise level companies.