What are the challenges

When GPSina first launched, the application server, web services, API server and admin portal were all being hosted in a data center. There was no backup, monitoring or health checks. System downtime was very high due to various issues and one of them being the system was not able to handle a surge of traffic at a certain period of time. Though they were able to get new users in, the retention rate was relatively low due to the stability and usability of the system.

Why AWS

Initially, management of GPSina was reluctant to migrate their system to AWS. “We have been struggling with the same problem for months since launch, we should try a new approach and see whether AWS could solve our problem”, says David Yap, Chief Operating Officer of GPSina. 

Cost was one of their key concerns while migrating their system to AWS, therefore a rehosting strategy was implemented during the migration process. Secondly, in order to increase their retention rate GPSina needed a stable and minimum migration down time. Rehosting strategy allowed them to easily migrate the existing system and up the system as soon as the migration was done.

Few small EC2 instances and RDS were used for the migration. Later on AWS cloudwatch was set up for monitoring purposes and S3 was used for the backup of logs.

After GPSina migrated their system into AWS, the system became stable and retention rate went up, they’ve decided to go further with AWS as their user base continues to grow, they know that this current setup will no longer be able to handle the load, therefore an application load balancer, network load balancer with auto scaling is being added to the setup, multi-AZ is being enabled for RDS to be used as read replica and as a failover database as well. AWS Route 53 is also being used for DNS. AWS Simple Email Service is also being implemented to send user verification and password reset emails.

The Benefits

GPSina has been able to continue to support the growth of business, after the first migration to AWS the business of GPSina has grown 20 fold, AWS has enabled GPSina to run business with peace of mind without worrying on technologically infrastructure.

By utilising RDS backup, S3, EBS snapshot and AMI, GPSina has the ability to manage backup of data, server management and development to deployment much efficiently compared to on premise hosting. GPSina has been progressively and successfully migrating their services and applications towards AWS cloud native services which in turn lower the operational cost and achieve better performance in the meantime.

David is extremely confident and has become a true believer of the cloud technologies that AWS provides. “We now have peace of mind to expand our market without worrying that technology is unable to cope with the business growth.”, he says.