Safe Kids Leverages the Power to Automate Infrastructure Deployments on AWS with Emumba's Help

Safe Kids AI is a company that provides secure monitoring applications on all devices that kids use, and empowers them to make good decisions, and thrive online/offline through improved mental health. Their parental control monitoring application was developed by AWS Partner Emumba, who built a reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure on AWS. The AWS infrastructure ensures Safe Kids AI and its customers with an application that is secure and private with no breach in data security.

Raising children in the digital age can be challenging. Numerous studies have shown a direct link between kids’ online activities and their psychological well-being. Kids exposed to a high amount of screen time can suffer from mental health issues and be vulnerable to explicit content such as, pornography, cyberbullying, gambling, unsafe search, online grooming and mature social networks. This can be challenging for parents too, as they want to monitor and get visibility into what their children are viewing online.

Passionate about providing secure monitoring on every device that kids use, Safe Kids AI reached out to Emumba, who has several years of experience in building reliable, secure and scalable web applications using AWS services and cloud-native architecture. In addition to developing a parental control application, the Emumba DevOps team was tasked with setting up a green-field infrastructure, data privacy and security was a critical client requirement so, the application needed to be secure and private, especially in capturing sensitive device screenshots in real-time.

Emumba carried out the infrastructure deployment by focusing on four key requirements: security, high availability, scalability and automation.

The team first focused on a critical client requirement – making the application secure with no breach in data security, as any breach would be detrimental to the value proposition of Safe Kids AI. For this purpose, the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) was deployed as it provides access control across the entire infrastructure. AWS best practices were followed to ensure maximum security by leveraging services such as AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Next, the team focused on making the AWS infrastructure highly available to avoid any downtime. Since continuous and seamless monitoring was a crucial component of the application, the client could not afford any interruption. The application was deployed across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) with AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) managing traffic loads across these zones in active-active configuration. Consequently, if any AZ went down, the Safe Kids AI application would still be available through another zone.

Another Safe Kids requirement was to make the product infrastructure scalable and efficient to provide a seamless user experience, as a large number of users had lined up for the beta program. In particular, for the ML model to continue processing streaming data in real-time, the underlying AWS infrastructure hosting the model had to be elastic. The team leveraged Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), and Amazon CloudWatch for implementing an asynchronous system that had the ability to dynamically scale up and down based on traffic.

Safe Kids needed the ability to bring up the entire application infrastructure in minutes, to handle fault tolerance in case of a crash or if Safe Kids wanted to deploy the application in other cloud premises. To achieve this, Emumba developed a containerized application that uses Amazon ECS and Terraform to automate the infrastructure deployment and remained platform agnostic.

Taking advantage of the AWS services, Emumba was successful in building a parental control application that intercepts unsafe activity and redirects kids to engage in healthy conversations with their parents. It keeps parents seamlessly informed via an online dashboard of their kid’s activities and sends alerts in case the kid engages in explicit content.

Emumba played a pivotal role for their client – the product they built to capture kids’ device screen shots in real-time enabled Safe Kids AI to win subsequent rounds of funding. For Emumba, this project was an excellent opportunity to offer their clients innovative solutions on AWS. This success has strengthened their expertise as AWS Partners and will have a huge impact on future projects where they can help clients rapidly grow using the AWS cloud ecosystem.

According to Owais Anjum, CEO at Emumba, “We chose AWS and its services as it allows us, as AWS partners, to deliver a reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure rapidly, thus delivering the project on schedule to meet Safe Kids AI timelines.”