Fictonica, a leader in web scraping, provides high-performance data extraction tools. As demand for data analysis grew, so did its business. However, its in-house servers struggled to keep up with new customers and rising workloads.
To overcome this, Fictonica partnered with TekBay Digital Solutions to migrate its entire operation to AWS Cloud. This migration allowed them to scale effectively, improve service reliability, and reduce operational costs while handling growing customer demands with ease.
Key Challenge: Outgrowing Legacy Architecture
Fictonica faced several critical challenges due to limitations in its on-premises infrastructure. These challenges included:
- Scalability Issues: The existing infrastructure struggled to scale with fluctuating workloads, particularly during peak data demand periods. This resulted in system overloads, slow response times, and frequent crashes, negatively impacting service quality.
- High Maintenance Costs: The company faced escalating costs for maintaining physical servers and hardware, straining financial resources and diverting attention from innovation.
- Outdated Technology: Legacy systems, combined with inadequate scaling and security measures, limited Fictonica’s agility and ability to meet evolving customer expectations.
- Inadequate Data Scaling and Security: Limited storage scalability and weak security measures posed data integrity and confidentiality risks.
- Manual Processes: The system required extensive manual intervention for updates and maintenance, leading to errors, delays, and preventing the technical team from focusing on strategic initiatives.
- High System Downtime: Frequent maintenance windows and manual changes resulted in significant system downtime, affecting service availability.
- Inadequate Data Scaling and Security: Limited storage scalability and weak security measures posed data integrity and confidentiality risks.
These challenges hindered Fictonica’s growth and operational efficiency, prompting the company to pursue a strategic cloud migration to enhance performance, reduce costs, and improve flexibility.
TekBay’s Solution: Cloud Migration to AWS
TekBay executed a strategic Lift-and-Shift migration to AWS to overcome these challenges, transitioning Fictonica’s data scraping operations to a more scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure.
The focus was on automation, scalability, and security to modernize and optimize workflows.
Key Components of the Solution
- Lift-and-Shift Migration: Initial migration of the existing application to AWS with minimal changes to ensure a smooth transition.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform was used to manage and provision infrastructure, ensuring consistency and reproducibility.
- Scalable Compute Resources: EC2 Auto Scaling was implemented using Golden AMIs (created using Packer with Ansible provisioner) to dynamically adjust the number of instances based on the workload, handling peaks efficiently.
- Scalable Storage: Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) provided scalable and shared file storage for data scraping applications.
- Highly Available Database: Amazon RDS with Multi-AZ deployment ensured database availability and resilience.
- Load Balancing: Elastic Load Balancing was set up to distribute traffic and prevent single points of failure to ensure optimal performance.
- Monitoring and Alerting: Amazon CloudWatch with Slack integration was used for real-time monitoring and alerts.
- Security Measures: Amazon WAF, Prowler, Inspector, and AWS Security Hub were implemented to enhance security and compliance.
- Data Backup and Recovery: Amazon Backup was used to meet RTO and RPO requirements for data recovery.
- Automation and CI/CD: GitHub Actions was integrated into the development and deployment pipeline, while Packer with Ansible provisioner was used for creating Golden AMIs. This reduced manual intervention and errors, allowing the company to deploy new features and fixes more frequently and efficiently.
Results
The migration to AWS transformed Fictonica’s infrastructure, resolving key challenges and delivering tangible improvements in several areas. The outcomes of the migration included:
- Infrastructure Consistency: Consistent environment setups across all stages with Terraform.
- Lead Time: The average lead time for code changes, from initial commit to production deployment, was reduced to 10-15 minutes, demonstrating the efficiency of the CI/CD pipeline.
- Deployment Frequency: It increased by 25%, with changes deployed to production within 10-15 minutes of being committed to the repository.
- Mean Time to Recover (MTTR): MTTR was reduced by 40%, enabling faster recovery from issues.
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): MTBF improved by 15%, ensuring greater system stability.
- Enhanced Customer Experience: Improved system performance led to a 20% increase in customer satisfaction.
- Data Recovery Assurance: Efficient data recovery processes meeting RTO and RPO standards.
- Increased Scraping Jobs: Capacity to handle concurrent scraping jobs increased by 30%, with no performance degradation.
- Reduced Job Completion Time: A 20% reduction in time to complete individual tasks, improving operational efficiency.
- Cost Reduction: Achieved 20% annual savings on infrastructure costs.
TekBay Digital Solutions led Fictonica‘s migration to AWS, which successfully addressed the scalability, performance, and cost challenges it faced with its legacy infrastructure.
By adopting AWS cloud-native services, automated deployment pipelines, and security measures, Fictonica transformed its data scraping operations into a more agile and efficient system. This shift improved operational efficiency and laid a strong foundation for future growth.
With reduced operational costs, increased system uptime, and better customer satisfaction, Fictonica is well-positioned to meet the increasing demand for web scraping services in an ever-evolving market.
