About AIMA: The All-India Management Association (AIMA) is the apex body for management in India with over 38000 members and close to 6000 corporate /institutional members through 66 Local Management Associations affiliated to it. AIMA was formed over 60 years ago and is a non-lobbying, not for profit organisation, working closely with industry, Government, academia, and students, to further the cause of the management profession in India.
Some of the servicesthey perform are listed below:
- Areas of testing
- Distance education
- Skill development & training
- Events & conferences
- Research
- Publications
- Executive education
- Management development programs.
The Challenge
The AIMA needed to deliver reliable, responsive online education services. The focus of the organization is to conduct the examination online and provide itinerary. Other services include a payment gateway that enables merchants to take payments digitally from consumers. Some of the challenges were
- They needed a scalable architecture to support increasing demand while allowing AIMA to control its costs.
- The cloud-service provider would need to operate a data center in India—to comply with legislation requiring consumers' data to be retained in India—and operate with minimum latency of 20 to 30 milliseconds.
- Existing servers were plagued with unforeseen downtime, often 15 to 20 minutes at a time, which severely affected performance during peak demand periods.
AIMA were previouslyrunning their Windows based application on a Private DC and were experiencing frequent performance issues,due to which they wanted to move to a more reliable public cloud service provider. This was a competitive win against Microsoft Azure where i2k2 successfully demonstrated the capabilities, features and benefits of AWS to the customer to run their Workload on AWS. i2K2 helped customer to solution the architecture on AWS using EC2 and SQL RDS as a key service to run and optimize the Windows Workloads.
The customer Application runs on .net and IIS app server. It uses window server 2016 for hosting the application and MS-SQL server 2016 Standard Edition as the backend database.
The Solution
Considering the customers' requirements for running scalable, fault tolerant web application and payment gateway, i2k2 proposed thesolution architecture which includedmigrating their Windows based application to EC2, database on RDSand integrated along with other managed AWS services. Key features of the solutions are
- Complete architecture has been configured in AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region to comply AIMAwith legislative requirements for customer's financial information to be retained within India.
- For the application servers we have configured IIS web server on EC2 with MS Windows Server2019 in private subnets across 2 availability zone.
- Application load balancer and Auto scaling groups are used to ensure high availability across multiple AZ's.
- For Database, MSSQL Server Standard Edition has been configured on RDS servers with high availability.
- NAT Gateway has been configured for outgoing connectivity to EC2 Instances in private subnets.
- OpenVPN has been configured on Linux EC2 instances for secure connectivity to AIMA team.
- System Manager is configured for patching the server &Microsoft applications on Amazon EC2 instances.
Key AWS Services Used
- VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) | NAT Gateway | Application Load Balancer | WAF | KMS
- System Manager| IAM User |CloudWatch| CloudTrail | SNS
- EC2 Instances for APP Server | EC2 Instances for OpenVPN Server
- RDS for DB SQL Server | GuardDuty | Route53 | Lambda
- CodePipeline | CodeCommit | CodeDeploy | S3
Benefits
Time is Money
It was taking 24 hours to deploy a single server. Now, it takes just 2 minutes to launch an Amazon EC2 instance.
Migrating to AWS has helped them improve efficiency and quality by running PoC's as part of development
High Performance
Transaction times have been reduced to 50%.They have also been able to keep latency within a few milliseconds to ensure payment services operate in timely fashion and deliver a high-quality customer experience.
Security & Compliance
Using the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region has also enabled AIMA to comply with legal requirements. They are also able to take advantage of advanced security services of the cloud like automated patching and firewall.
Cost Management
AIMA has also cut the time and expense of managing its IT because most of the AWS infrastructure is used in pay as you go model and can scale when required. The company has reduced costs of its IT by 30% by migrating to AWS.
Why Amazon Web Services
AWS is a secure cloud services environment, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.
By moving to AWS, organizations are realizing benefits such as a broad IT infrastructure, support for a variety of use cases, feature sets, enhanced visibility, and the ability to deploy globally within minutes.
AWS EC2:
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier.
AWS RDS:
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups.
AWS CloudTrail:
It is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account.
AWS System Manager:
AWS Systems Manager simplifies resource and application management, shortens the time to detect and resolve operational problems, and makes it easy to operate and manage your infrastructure securely at scale.
Why i2k2
Managed Amazon cloud services provider, i2k2 provides comprehensive folio of cloud solutions along with prompt and reliable support. Our partnership with AWS goes several years back, even before we formalized our association with the company in 2013. Key reason to choose i2k2 was 21+ years of proven business. Talent is vast due to extensive IT exposure in India.
About i2k2 Networks
i2k2 Networks is the No.1 dedicated web hosting company in India and a trusted name in the IT cloud hosting services industry that offers a full gamut of cutting edge enterprise solutions which drive business in today's Internet-powered world. Our folio includes Dedicated Servers, Cloud Hosting- Public, Private and Hybrid, Data Center Services, Business Email Solutions, Managed IT Services, Backup, and DR Solutions, DevOps Services, Cloud Enablement, Enterprise Hardware solutions, and various other integrated services. A team of dedicated and professionally driven IT experts conversant with diverse client requirements are available 24x7x365 to provide extended support. With superior technologies to host, design and develop high-quality websites and applications, we ensure to deliver unmatched value to our clients.