STCLab Makes Inroads into The Global Market by Building Its SaaS solution on AWS

STCLab has been providing its traffic control and monitoring solution to about 400 customers since 2008. NetFUNNEL adjusts the traffic in real time when traffic spikes, exceeding the system capacity, thereby protecting the system and stabilizing service provison. For atypical traffic bursts that the infrastructure cannot handle, such as during the National Tax Service’s year-end tax adjustments, registration for courses at universities, or reservations for vaccination, NetFUNNEL creates a virtual waiting room and places users in a first-in, first-out, queue. This  solution helps to right-size the infrastructure to save costs.

As NetFUNNEL and AppInsighter are provided in an on-premise environment, STCLab faced several challenges. For instance, it had to make on-site customer visits to install and maintain servers. Also, it had limitations expanding globally running an older infrastructure. The company was also paying for perpetual licenses, which left some customer demands unaddressed, while missing opportunities to attract cloud-native companies.

Many companies around the world have started to move to the cloud, and also scaled their services during the past couple of years. With that comes a traffic surge in the process. More attention was thus paid to virtual waiting room solutions, such as NetFunnel. With its decade-long technology experience, STCLab decided to expand worldwide. “As it was our first journey to cloud, we evaluated various cloud providers, looking at strong technical support, stable services, and technology. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the one that met our needs,” said STCLab’s CSO, Lee Sang-yeob.

NetFUNNEL controls and creates a queue to deal with sudden traffic surges. However, if a cloud vendor fails, or if a network issue occurs, the service cannot function, leading to service failures or delays. Technological stability was a significant factor in STCLab’s evaluation of  AWS as its partner.

AWS dedicated an AWS account manager and solution architect to help STCLab build the SaaS version of NetFUNNEL. They also provided support to STCLab as it was unfamiliar with the SaaS business. When expanding globally, each tenant needed a URL for the virtual waiting room and Amazon Route 53 provided that. “Given the nature of our service, URLs should be assigned separately, and AWS was the only one offering such a feature,” said Lee.

STCLab uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service(RDS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service(Amazon S3) to build the server infrastructure. Elastic Load Balancing(ELB) and Network Load Balancer(NLB) were added for distributing traffic, and Amazon CloudFront was used to deploy the application. It uses AWS CodeDeploy for tenant provisioning and application updates, and automatically provisions tenants through AWS CloudFormation.

“Thanks to active support from AWS, the development period only took three months, much shorter than our initial expectation of 1.5 years,” said STCLab’s SaaS Team Lead, Jeong Dae-beom. Also, STCLab completed the AWS Foundational Technical Review) and is certified for AWS Partner Path. NetFUNNEL’s SaaS version is registered on AWS Marketplace.

STCLab is laying the foundation to leap forward globally. Building the NetFUNNEL’s SaaS on AWS lets it offer the service quickly, while supplementing and expanding its service. Lee said that the company is a leader in the virtual waiting room solution market, but has low recognition in the cloud ecosystem. By joining the AWS Partner Path and registering NetFUNNEL’s SaaS on AWS Marketplace, STCLab was able to raise its profile.

As NetFUNNEL creates a virtual waiting room to alleviate traffic spikes, its servers should be close to where customers operate globally. AWS plays a critical role for STCLab in its global market entry, allowing it to rapidly distribute and deploy its services with a few clicks.

“The development time on AWS was reduced by five times compared to the on-premise environment, letting us focus more on developing our products. We have been able to expand globally and meet the needs of various customers as a result,” said Jeong. He added that STCLab will iterate its services, such as enhancing the NetFUNNEL SaaS, developing new services with rapid development and testing features on AWS, and adopting container services for making services lightweight and infrastructure management convenient.

“We expect to identify potential customers overseas through our marketing program and the AWS Marketplace. Designating 2022 as the first year of our global expansion, we will build a long-term and close partnership with AWS, based on STCLAb’s ambition to expand into wherever an AWS Region exists,” explained Lee.