About Customer
Industry: Government
The Assam Power Distribution Company Limited (APDCL) is a state-owned power distribution company in India, established in 2009. With a mission to provide reliable, affordable, and quality electricity to all customers, APDCL offers a wide range of services, including electricity supply, metering, billing, customer service, load management, and energy efficiency services. Its robust infrastructure encompasses over 300,000 kilometers of transmission and distribution lines, 20,000 transformers, and 10 million meters. Financially sound with a turnover of over Rs. 8,000 crore in 2022-23, APDCL has been recognized for its excellence in energy management and conservation. Despite facing challenges such as high electricity demand, aging infrastructure, financial constraints, and rural electrification, APDCL remains committed to its future plans, including investing in new technologies, expanding its network, and reducing its carbon footprint.
Current Infrastructure
APDCL’s current IT infrastructure is a hybrid cloud environment, combining on-premises and cloud-based resources. The cloud-based infrastructure consists of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon CloudTrail. The on-premises infrastructure includes a data center, network infrastructure, and security infrastructure. This hybrid cloud architecture provides APDCL with scalability, flexibility, cost- effectiveness, security, and compliance
The Challenge
EC2 instance sizing needs to be re-evaluated to optimize for cost and performance. A multi-AZ setup is recommended to improve availability and disaster recovery capabilities. Changes to the architecture should be carefully considered to avoid impacting costs. A breakdown of the project into smaller milestones is recommended to manage stringent timelines. AWS CloudWatch can be used to identify performance bottlenecks. A dedicated project sponsor should be identified from the business to advocate for the project. Regular communication channels should be established with the existing partner to ensure they are kept informed. The customer should be able to provide the required testing assets and tools.
The Solution
To optimize EC2 instance sizing for cost and performance, consider using smaller instances, reserved instances, or Spot instances. Utilize AWS Cost Explorer to monitor spending and AWS Auto Scaling to dynamically adjust instance capacity. Transition from a Single AZ setup to multi-AZ for improved availability, employing Amazon CloudWatch and Route 53 Health Checks for monitoring and automatic failover. When implementing architecture changes, carefully assess their impact on costs and leverage the AWS Well-Architected Framework for secure, reliable, and cost-effective designs. To meet stringent timelines, break down the project into manageable milestones, employ agile methodologies, and automate code deployment with AWS Code Build and Code Deploy. Identify and address performance bottlenecks using AWS CloudWatch, offload tasks with AWS Lambda, and leverage caching with Amazon Elastic cache and data storage with Amazon DynamoDB. Ensure business support by identifying a dedicated project sponsor, maintaining communication with partners, and utilizing AWS Partner Network (APN) for additional support. For testing, collaborate with the customer to provide necessary assets, and automate testing with AWS Code Pipeline, securely storing code changes in AWS Code Commit, and managing releases with AWS Code Star.
Security
- 1. AWS WAF is provided to protect apps and APIs against bots and exploits that consume resources, skew metrics, or cause downtime
- 2. AWS GuardDuty is deployed for threat detection and it also continuously monitor the infra to detect any kind of malicious activity
- 3. Important instances are kept in the private subnet and user access can be provided by using VPN
- 4. AWS Security Hub is deployed here for security posture management service that automates best practice checks, aggregates alerts and supports automated remediation
- 5. Access Management and Security of Keys is achieved using the KMS (key Management Service).
- 6. MFA is also implemented to provide an extra layer of authentication.
Resiliency
- 1. A Multi-AZ infrastructure has been architected for this customer
- 2. Snapshots are being taken properly with a defined frequency and kept within S3, as-per-required retention
period
Other Services
SNS
CloudWatch
CloudTrail
AWS Config
The Solution/Architecture Diagram
Why i2k2?
Our strategy
Cloud Computing – We are highly proficient in cloud hosting serving more than 4000 Corporates with 14000+ VMs and Physical servers mainly in India.
Cloud Consulting – We are adept at delivering solutions on public cloud, private cloud, and Hybrid cloud. We are partners with AWS, Azure, Google, and other cloud providers.
Our mission
Focus to service our customers and create products that are extremely user-centric and solution-oriented with a highly-skilled technical team and a vast experience in the technology space, we have been developing products that are solving real-life issues that can service the masses
Our vision
We offer tailor-made solutions and services so that businesses can leverage the maximum benefits through us. We ensure that the delivery and quality parameters are met and remain committed to the best possible customer experience