Toss Lab provides services for JANDI, an SaaS business solution. JANDI is an Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based business messenger, developed entirely by Toss Lab, and is optimized for Asia's business environment. The most characteristic features of JANDI is that it processes creation/deletion/access requests of business content through advanced networking technology, and ensures real-time processing of relevant events. Today, JANDI is used in Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and China, with the total number of users over eighty thousand individuals and teams. Toss Lab is registered with AWS as a Technology Partner.
Toss Lab planned to develop a business messenger service in the form of a SaaS solution utilizing a limited budget and resources. Three criteria were primarily considered in the development.
- Service operations need to be secure and rapid.
- When uploading messages and files to the service, multiple users must be allowed to share and access at the same time.
- When a service user joins a specific chat room, he/she should be allowed access to previous messages and files in the chat room.
The public cloud satisfied all of these criteria and, after review, AWS was selected.
Toss Lab reviewed both local and global cloud solutions and chose AWS based on its convenience and reliability. Evaluating AWS's global service capabilities and references, it was decided that SaaS solution development was easier with AWS than others. Since operating hours of JANDI is largely influenced by the operating hours of the infrastructure that Toss Lab uses, reliability is very important. In addition, convenience was also important as JANDI should be developed and operated with limited human interaction.
"JANDI was designed to be accessible from many countries around the world and AWS was suitable as it had a large number of global SaaS references." Said Sangrok Jeon, Director of Software Development. "JANDI Must provide its services 24/7 and the cost needs to be managed reasonably. Considering auto scaling, a variety of storage, and a Content Distribution Network that are required to establish infrastructure for overseas services, the introduction of AWS was an obvious decision.” added Junsu Kang, an engineer of the development team.
Currently, Toss Lab uses an Application Load Balancer with Elastic Load Balancing to handle traffic on a large scale and disperses it automatically to an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance. The files uploaded by customers are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and linked with Amazon S3 to utilize CDN services, and Amazon CloudFront in order to ensure the improvement of content transmission rates. In addition, traffic rapidly increases during certain events or issues since it is a messenger and requires automatic expansion of instances. To do this, JANDI has achieved cost effectiveness by using Auto Scaling. Additional data storage uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) that supports high availability and automatic failover for DB instances.
AWS Lambda is used for importing preview information in an RSS format upon entering a hyperlink in to a message window. To secure stability and high availability, Automatic Failover by Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is used. Furthermore, each allocated server was implemented individually to improve stability in data increase through the Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)-based messaging so that expandability is guaranteed.
The following below is an architectural diagram of Toss Lab.
Toss Lab was able to re-architect their solution easily and quickly by using AWS, and through this, the operation of their SaaS service is stable. Since a messenger has variable traffic in different business environments of each customer, unexpected increase in traffic may occur. In this case, Elastic Load Balancing and Application Load Balancing were useful to handle a large scale of traffic.
"When CPU was either overloaded or with insufficient memory at the time of installing a server in an existing IDC, it needed to be replaced with a new server. On the other hand, AWS had an advantage that the service was available when it was operated after stopping instances and changing the type. Therefore, the initial investment required was definitely reduced, and it was convenient to use due to easiness of creating, deleting, and modifying instances.” explained Sangrok Jeon, Director of Software Development.
Toss Lab was able to easily identify and countermeasure operational issues of the service by using features such as Metric, Dashboard, and Alarm provided by Amazon CloudWatch.
"JANDI receives various benefits as a Technology Partner with AWS. Through this, the constant service of stability has been achieved and the standard of SLA has increased up to 99.9 percent." said the director of development.
"The AWS Console and SDK are user-friendly and well equipped with ISV partner systems so that high possibility of development is easily achieved," according to the engineer Kang.
The director, Jeon Sang-rok, explained, "AWS continues to fully support its technology partners faithfully. It provides a wide range of support such as direct advice on optimized design for SaaS-specialized architect as well as indirect support through a partnership with 'Megazone,' a consulting partner." Furthermore, "based on its partnership with AWS, Toss Lab plans to expand its services globally with AWS Marketplace and co-operation with various APN partner companies," the director stated.
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