AWS Case Study: Generativa

The Business Challenges

On a daily basis, the Portal receives information from about 70 municipalities and must consolidate all the information on servers for testing, homologation, and production.

Why Amazon Web Services

The Transparency team chose Amazon Web Service (AWS) in 2008 because, says Fabian Caetano, CIO, Generativa, “At that time, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud [Amazon EC2] seemed to be the only datacenter service available that could allow us to begin with only one server, and increment the number of servers as necessary during our development and sales processes.” He adds, “The value of Amazon EC2 has been proven since then, because now we use about 40 servers as our infrastructure.”
The following diagram illustrates the architecture used by the team:

The Transparency team uses a combination of Microsoft technologies to implement this architecture:

• Back-end programs and web services developed in .NET using GeneXus
• MS SQL Server 2008 database
• Blended front-end solution using .NET, JavaScript , GeneXus, and a FusionCharts library of charts, widgets, and maps
• Business Benefits

Caetano describes the benefits he has seen from working with AWS: “We like the immediate availability of services. That is, when we decide on a specific server configuration, it is available very quickly. We also appreciate the detailed control panel, because we can check the use and the cost of servers online, disk usage, transactions, bytes transferred, etc. AWS also allows different  servers size options, so we can choose the size of the server in terms of memory, disk, and processing very easily, starting with a small one and growing as the business demands, without unnecessary investments. The virtually ‘infinite’ storage space is a plus, as is the ease of administration, with a web interface that is very clear and easy to use.”
In addition, says Caetano, “AWS allowed us to migrate our entire infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud.  As a result, W5 is positioned as one of the first software houses to create solutions for the public sector on the cloud.”

Caetano explains that the team already has some new projects going: “We are now implementing the new ERP for the public sector, to meet international accounting standards that will be required starting in 2014. We are also using map technology, along with public and private data, to display customized views of states and municipalities.”

To learn more, visit http://www.generativa.com.br/ .

Added March 5, 2012