Vietcetera
Migration from GCP to AWS: Optimizing Scalability & Performance
Founded in 2016, Vietcetera is a first-of-its-kind multimedia digital platform producing editorial content along with video series and podcasts in both Vietnamese and English.
Industry
Media
Technology
VIETCETERA – MIGRATION JOURNEY TO AWS
Founded in 2016, Vietcetera is a first-of-its-kind multimedia digital platform producing editorial content along with video series and podcasts in both Vietnamese and English. Vietcetera Media is the fastest-growing digital media company in Vietnam with a total monthly audience network of 10 million. The audience is growing both locally and across the global Vietnamese diaspora.
Industry:
Media
Technology:
AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud
CUSTOMER CHALLENGE
Vietcetera is hosting their services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). However, with the desire to change to find the most suitable service, the company decided to move the system to operate on AWS. The Vietnam-based technology and consulting company Renova Cloud has been selected by Vietcetera to cooperate in this migration process, because it is both an AWS partner and a GCP partner, so Renova Cloud can support this process as smoothly as possible. .
The main components in the system:
- Nginx web servers hosting web applications
- Web Services and APIs Programmatic Service Interfaces
- Database and Caching services
- Object storage for hosting static content like videos and images
Customer requirements:
- To adapt with the company’s growth, the system requires high availability and self-elasticity at peak times where there are many events taking place
- Managed service, orchestration of containers running web services and APIs
- Minimize overload during system operation and maintenance
SOLUTION – RENOVA CLOUD APPROACH
After considering customer’s requirements as well as evaluating the current system of Vietcetera, Renova Cloud deployed Vietcetera’s system on AWS:
- The backend system will be deployed through AWS Fargate – serverless computing for containers. This helps the customer to focus more on their business logic. The only thing to care about is deploying and managing applications and services, instead of infrastructure. This drastically reduces operation and maintenance tasks.
- AWS Fargate will be managed by Amazon ECS. Amazon ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale applications contained in containers.
- To ensure availability and increase scalability, applications will be run in AWS Auto Scaling. Specific rules based on resource usage are configured to trigger auto scaling – when resource usage increases, additional servers are automatically added.
- Static content such as videos, photos, etc. will be copied from Google Cloud Storage to Amazon S3 – durable and cost-effective service for storing content. Vietcetera’s frontend system will include a container service to access S3, and Amazon CloudFront service – a CDN service on AWS – to deliver content to customers.
- Initialize an EC2 server as Nginx server.
- Initialize 3 EC2 servers to form a MongoDB database cluster system. Data will be backed up to Amazon S3 daily to ensure data durability.
- Amazon OpenSearch Service based on Elasticsearch technology makes it easy to perform interactive log analysis, real-time application monitoring, and helps users quickly find relevant data in applications, websites, and more.
- Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is a Redis-compatible in-memory data store built for the cloud with blazing fast access, providing sub-millisecond latency to run real-time applications in internet scale.
- In addition, provision and configure necessary services such as: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps manage access to services and resources in secure, managed and AWS users and groups. AWS CloudTrail helps monitor and continuously update logs, Amazon CloudWatch helps monitor the health of resources in the system and sends alerts when in overload.
BENEFITS
- Pay only for what you use (on-demand)
- Control access to resources and activities.
- Ensuring applications perform stably in unexpected times, high traffic in a short time based on the auto scaling system. This also helps to reduce redundant costs due to the ability to self-collect when the traffic returns to normal – both ensuring system performance and optimizing payment costs.
- Reduce the pressure on the operation team due to the use of serverless computing.
- Automated backups and easy management of backups ensure data recovery whenever needed.
- It is possible to monitor the resources in the system, set alerts to react to problems that may affect the system => be more proactive in administration.
- Ability to coordinate with other AWS services for future system development demands.