Longtail Case Study

About the company

Longtail e-media initially started as an interactive CD-ROM developing company, which also developed websites. They provide free static HTML websites with every CD-ROM project. They helped their clients in creating content, photography, videography, compilation, program in Macromedia flash (currently engaged in Adobe flash) and finalized as Autorun Exe CDs. With the changes in the technology, they focused on interactivity & content development and soon shifted from CD ROM to web application development. Content making has always been a part of their work. Every new business is heartily welcome as well as taking good care of ongoing clients.

Problem Statement

Currently, Longtail is running its colocation environment for workloads and application. They have been using a dedicated server with 4 core VCPUs, 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD storage. With the board services provided by longtail, it would result in an increase in exponential data growth. With the current infrastructure, it would result in investing in high-tech servers that will occupy significant space for managing data as well as maintain infrastructure in a timely manner. Sooner or later, longtail will have a large amount of data including photos, videos, websites that need to be stored for frequently access as well as for backup usage.

As storage size is growing bigger and faster, it is getting difficult for them to manage their storage infrastructure. In addition to that, the cost of running and maintaining the data centre is increasing rapidly with additional manpower for maintenance. They face problems in scaling their infrastructure as well. They are also facing problems in maintaining their data securely and sometimes websites being hacked. Another difficulty is monitoring their application health and sometimes suffering from downtime due to the excessive hits. Their source of storing data is Hard Disk as primary storage.

Proposal

As an advanced consulting partner of AWS, Genese Software Solution proposed a solution to facilitate their overall infrastructure and primary storage of their system in the AWS cloud.

We proposed the following options for primary storage in the AWS cloud.

Amazon S3:

• Use of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for storing c files and documents with proper security implementation to store data at rest as well as in transit.
• We proposed the options to configure fine-grained control of access of S3 resources using Bucket and object-level policies along with IAM policies.
• Proposed the use of S3 bucket for hosting static websites with low cost.

Lightsail:

• Offered subscription and pay-as-you-use services s for virtualized computing, storage, application deployment.
• Suggested for websites including WordPress, custom sites, and e-commerce.
• Suggested for simple web apps.
• Suggested for prototyping and test environments.
• It runs through pre-installed software with less confusion for users.

Route53:

• Proposed for domain name registration for other companies.
• Suggested to create and manage your public DNS records
• Suggested to create DNS records for a new domain or transfer DNS records for an existing domain.
• Suggested health checks to monitor the health and performance of their application.

KMS (Key Management Service):

• Suggested AWS Encryption SDK easily uses and protect encryption keys.
• Suggested KMS verify that data is encrypted consistently across the applications.
• Proposed KMS to reduce their security licensing costs and operational burden.
• Suggested as only authenticated users can encrypt and decrypt the data.
• Monitoring of users as who has used the key for what purposes.

Solution

The main purpose of Longtail was to migrate the colocation environment to AWS along storage. For initiating this, we first created a lightsail for hosting the web applications. Then, for domain registration and hosting the client web application we have used route53 for domain registration and created a hosted zone where the clients DNS record has been created and maintained along with web application health checkup monitoring. This will help in minimizing the overloading effects on the application by an excessive hit. Since, longtail is also engaged on photography and videography, we have used S3 buckets as a storage for storing all the files in that particular bucket. If the size of the data is bigger than S3 such as 6GB then it will use multipart upload for uploading the files faster than uploading a single file at once which will be much slower. By default, encryption is enabled in S3 bucket and all the uploaded objects are in private which means files cannot be browsed. We can also enable the bucket policy which will enforce as who has access to view the bucket and who cannot access the bucket. All the data transfer process will be securely executed by the KMS (Key Management Service) which will encrypt all data being stored in AWS and generate a key which will only be accessed by an authenticated user and for viewing those data it the data key is needed to decrypt. Using the KMS, we can also identify which user has used the data key to encrypt and decrypt the data through cloudtrail.

The POC was successfully concluded within one month after the environment was completely implemented in AWS.

Result

As an advanced consulting partner of AWS, Genese Software Solution proposed a solution to facilitate Disaster Recovery environment on AWS cloud for disaster scenarios with minimal disruption and downtime.

For this, we proposed different options for disaster recovery available in AWS.