AWS Case Study: icck.net

The Business Challenges

According to Marcela Díaz, CIO at ICCK.net: "ICCK faced the challenge of creating a high availability infrastructure environment that allowed for:

• Elastic growth of hardware resources in line with the dynamic demand of all our portals
• Dynamic and cost efficient testing and development environments
• Acceleration of the complete life cycle of new solutions implementation in line with our fast paced business environment
• Reduction of overall IT infrastructure costs, which currently represent a high percentage of our total Opex
• Last but not least, we required local support services for Amazon Web Services in order to expedite response times."

Why Amazon Web Services

With all that in mind, a project was deployed through Avanxo, a solution provider for AWS in Colombia, to set up an infrastructure that leveraged the following AWS’s services:

• Amazon EC2 with Linux Centos instances
• Amazon RDS with MySQL database
• Auto Scaling to configure automatic web servers capacity growth
• Elastic Load Balancer for load balancing web servers

A proof of concept was deployed using ICCK’s in-house Linux and Drupal-based applications in order to prepare for a future migration to a 100% cloud environment of all production web servers with dynamic traffic.

Accordingly, the team of certified consultants at Avanxo deployed an architecture of robust web servers designed to sustain high demand in a high availability environment based on the above mentioned Amazon Web Services offerings (see image below).

This auto scaling configuration, in conjunction with Avanxo’s support, allows for automatic capacity growth in line with the web servers dynamic load and connection requests, thus helping to ensure the required availability and service levels of ICCK’s portal.

The Business Benefits

As confirmed by Marcela Díaz, CIO of ICCK, "The critical factors to take the decision in favor of implementing AWS services with Avanxo were the auto scaling capabilities, given the specific needs of our business and the flexibility of working with AWS."

Ms. Díaz concluded that, “Thanks to the results obtained with this proof of concept, we have achieved the following benefits:

• 30% cost reduction
• 1 month reduction in time to market of new solutions
• 4 Linux Centos active instances with auto scaling and immediate provisioning

These benefits were obtained in a very short period of time, allowing us to respond in an agile manner to the particular needs of our fast-paced business.”

Díaz then adds that, "Even with the fact that we were already familiar with the basic offerings of Amazon Web Services, we now see Avanxo as a strategic ally who allows us to maximize our leverage of AWS functionality and increase the strength of our applications in high availability environments. We also now have access to immediate provisioning of testing environments as required by demand variations, which improves the efficiency of our operation and at the same time optimizes costs in a very important way.”

To learn more, visit http://icck.net .

Added June 18, 2012