Playauto provides integrated management system solutions for the e-commerce industry. Prior to building a new software version, Playauto re-examined how the infrastructure of an on-premises data center housing about 250 servers could support existing customers and help expand IT infrastructure to foster the company’s future growth. After reviewing the options for expanding the existing on-premises environment or providing services through a cloud infrastructure, the logical decision was to construct Playauto 2.0 as a cloud-based service to obtain more flexibility to respond to future growth.
Playauto was selected as a recipient of the ‘Global SaaS Incubating Project’ (GSIP) run by the National IT Industry Promotion Agency; GSIP supports partnerships between global cloud service companies and to-be cloud-based SaaS service developers. Due to this designation, Playauto was able to join the AWS Partner Network (APN) as a technology partner company. “If we were to expand our infrastructure from 250 servers, we would have needed more workers to achieve operational stability,” says Playauto Chief Technology Officer Matthew Kim. “However, the total management service of AWS took care of a lot of developer tasks, which allowed us to focus purely on development.” Lee Jae-sung, head engineer for Playauto, adds: “From a developer’s perspective, AWS was much easier to use without any basic system engineering knowledge. It was also convenient to use it for responding quickly to errors.”
Currently, Playauto 2.0 provides SaaS services on AWS. The infrastructure is built on AWS services such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, and Amazon DynamoDB. The processing backend for microservice response in web applications and order collections are built on a serverless infrastructure using AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway.
Through the application of Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), a fully managed message queuing service, the Playauto 2.0 system architecture is connected by a messaging service to provide stronger systematic stability. The Auto Scaling policy based on SQS queuing is deployed for better scalability and cost efficiency. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is used as a core service for Playauto.
A diagram of Playauto’s architecture
Playauto designed and built the Playauto 2.0 service on a limited budget and timeframe through AWS’s fully managed service. “We were able to refer to the old version used on-premises to create, deploy, and distribute code when creating new services. We even added the Auto Scaling function. We really benefited from the Elastic Beanstalk which took care of everything at once,” says Kim. In the prior solution, Playauto used RabbitMQ, where message duplications could occur. Nine servers were needed for failover systems to prevent such problems. However, with SQS or Elasticache, the company now has high availability, simplicity, convenience, and cost reduction.
“Services we could not provide due to difficulties in building extra infrastructure or lack of workers became possible with AWS services,” says Kim. “As a result, we were able to concentrate on developing new services based on customer demand.”
As an APN partner, Playauto receives support for AWS training programs so its developers can grow, explore a sandbox of the services provided by AWS throughout new service development, and benefit from continuous technology consultation from SaaS experts.
“We’ve benefitted from the SaaS service architecture review from partner solution architects based on the Well-Architected Framework, and technology advice for making our service even better,” says Kim. “As a result, we’ve reduced the time needed to create a new service on AWS by 40 percent. In regards to database management, tasks that took a month to prepare and build on-premises now take about 10 minutes using AWS. We’ve gained both convenience and productivity. As an AWS Technology partner, we hope to continuously collaborate on the creation of new SaaS services, utilize the AWS Marketplace to develop global businesses, and cultivate our business partnership where we can create synergy.”
Playauto provides integrated management system solutions for online businesses, specializing in creating integrated management systems so companies can trade goods on domestic or foreign websites such as Gmarket, TMON, and Amazon. Playauto’s integrated e-commerce management solution helps online sellers handle product registrations, orders, and inventory management without having to log into every shopping mall site. Since its 2005 launch, about 4,000 medium-large online sellers have used Playauto EMP. Playauto constructed its new management solution, Playauto 2.0, as a SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
For more information, contact Infiniti Consulting Group through its listing on the APN Partner Solution Finder or visit its website.
Learn more about the AWS SaaS Factory program and SaaS Partner Solutions on Marketplace.