Case Study - Kestone Global ECS

Kestone’s legacy application hosting relied on EC2-based virtual machines, where applications were tightly coupled to servers. This model made it difficult to scale, deploy, and secure applications efficiently. During marketing campaigns and product launches, traffic spikes often stressed backend servers, resulting in slower response times and operational risk.

Kestone needed a platform that could deliver consistent performance, automated scaling, and modern DevOps workflows without increasing operational overhead

Key Challenges

• Performance Bottlenecks – Applications struggled to handle traffic surges during campaign launches.
• Limited Scalability – Manual or slow infrastructure scaling caused delays and instability.
• Deployment Risks – Application updates required server-level changes, creating downtime and risk.
• Operational Overhead – Managing multiple EC2 instances, OS patching, and environment consistency was time-consuming.
• Security Gaps – Securing servers, secrets, and network access across multiple environments was complex.

i2k2 Networks designed and deployed a cloud-native container platform using Amazon ECS that enables Kestone to run, scale, and secure their applications with high availability and operational efficiency.

The solution leverages:

• Amazon ECS for container orchestration
• Amazon ECR for secure container image management
• Application Load Balancer (ALB) for intelligent traffic routing
• AWS IAM, Secrets Manager, and WAF for security
• Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring and logging

This architecture is fully aligned with AWS Well-Architected Framework principles.

Solution Highlights

Containerized Application Platform

• Applications are packaged as Docker containers and stored in Amazon ECR
• Amazon ECS schedules, runs, and manages containers across multiple Availability Zones.
• Environments (Dev, UAT, Prod) are fully consistent, eliminating configuration drift.

Security & Compliance

• Containers run inside private VPC subnets, not exposed directly to the internet.
• Application Load Balancer acts as the only public entry point.
• AWS IAM roles provide secure, temporary credentials to ECS tasks.
• AWS Secrets Manager stores database passwords, API keys, and application secrets securely.
• AWS WAF protects applications from SQL injection, XSS, and malicious bots.

Scalability & High Availability

• ECS services are deployed across multiple Availability Zones.
• Auto Scaling policies increase or decrease running containers based on CPU, memory, and request volume.
• ALB health checks ensure traffic is sent only to healthy containers.
• Applications continue running even if individual containers or instances fail.

Notification & Operational Efficiency

• ECS automatically replaces unhealthy containers.
• CloudWatch alarms notify the operations team if CPU, memory, or error thresholds are exceeded.
• Rolling deployments allow new versions to be released without downtime.
• CI/CD pipelines push new container images to ECR and deploy directly into ECS.

Security and Monitoring

• Amazon CloudWatch monitors:
  • ECS task and service health
  • CPU & memory utilization
  • ALB request count, latency, and error rates
• CloudWatch Logs centralize application and container logs.
• AWS CloudTrail records all configuration and API changes for auditing.
• AWS WAF & ALB logs provide full visibility into security events and traffic patterns.

• Improved performance – Applications scale automatically during high-traffic campaigns.
• Higher availability – Multi-AZ ECS architecture prevents downtime.
• Faster deployments – New features released without service disruption.
• Reduced operational effort – No server patching or manual scaling required.
• Stronger security – Applications protected by IAM, WAF, and private networking.
• Cost efficiency – Containers share infrastructure, reducing idle compute and over-provisioning.

By implementing Amazon ECS, i2k2 Networks enabled Kestone Global to modernize its application platform with a secure, scalable, and fully managed container infrastructure.The ECS-based solution eliminated server management complexity, improved reliability, accelerated deployments, and strengthened security — allowing Kestone to focus on delivering high-impact digital campaigns instead of managing infrastructure.This case study demonstrates i2k2 Networks’ deep expertise in designing, deploying, and operating production-grade AWS ECS environments, fully aligned with the AWS ECS Service Delivery Program (SDP) requirements.