AWS Case Study: ÓRAMA

Since it first began operations, ÓRAMA decided to forgo a traditional physical infrastructure. Guilherme Horn, the company’s founder and CEO, notes, “We started to develop ÓRAMA’s systems in 2009 and because we are early adopters of new technologies, our intent was to have everything in the cloud. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was a natural selection in that context.”

Before choosing AWS as its cloud technology provider, the company conducted an extensive inquiry into its own needs and industry expectations. Guilherme Horn explains, “One of our main requirements is scalability. Our infrastructure must be able to support great growth in operations in a very short period of time. It is very expensive to do that with our own infrastructure, and we would probably have idleness, which reduces return on investment.” Horn goes on to say, “Our other requirements are availability, performance, and security. We did a lot of tests with AWS that can attest to its capabilities to meet these requirements.”

ÓRAMA’s developers used the Python programming language, in combination with a variety of AWS features, to create an effective solution for the company’s website and administration systems. This solution utilizes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with Elastic Load Balancing to distribute traffic between multiple Availability Zones (AZs). Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) securely houses customer data and website statistics, while Amazon CloudFront provides the company with low-latency content delivery. The backbone of the ÓRAMA infrastructure is Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which offers the company the assurance of point-in-time recovery and DB Snapshots, along with multi-AZ replication.

In addition, Amazon Route 53 provides ÓRAMA with all of its Domain Name System (DNS) web services for its various websites. Plus, ÓRAMA’s developers can monitor the entire infrastructure with Amazon CloudWatch, which allows the company to examine and fine-tune all of its resources in real-time.

Just as ÓRAMA broke new ground by opening up the Brazilian investment market to a larger segment of the population, it also moved the financial industry a step forward with the benefits of cloud services. Guilherme Horn says, “Investing in technology is significant in our business and using AWS represented a real paradigm shift. It was not an easy decision because we are in the financial market, which is totally concerned with security issues and also tends to be more conservative. But AWS allowed us to create a great solution, in terms of security, performance, availability, and scalability.”

To learn more, visit https://www.orama.com.br/ .

Added December 7, 2011