Investiaa, a platform connecting startups, investors, and academia, is currently grappling with operational challenges that are impeding its growth and efficiency. The urgency of these challenges is underscored by the high costs and complexity of managing multiple virtual machines on Linode Cloud, performance bottlenecks due to RabbitMQ latency, and the potential for manual deployments to lead to inconsistent updates and downtime. These challenges are not just hindering our progress, but also necessitate immediate action to ensure our future success.

Our proposed solution is a more automated, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure. These changes will not only address the current challenges but also enhance user experience, optimize resource utilization, and streamline operations, ensuring Investiaa’s future growth and success.

Key Challenges: Performance Bottlenecks in RabbitMQ:

The startup ecosystem platform is experiencing significant operational challenges with its current infrastructure setup, impacting its ability to scale, maintain high performance, and efficiently deliver user updates. The key issues include:

• High Costs and Management Overhead: The platform is hosted on Linode Cloud with multiple virtual machines (VMs) per service, increasing operational costs and infrastructure management complexity.
• Performance Bottlenecks in RabbitMQ: Delays and latency in RabbitMQ are causing critical performance issues, leading to slower response times and negatively affecting user experience.
• Manual CI/CD Processes: The absence of automated CI/CD processes results in inconsistent deployments, frequent downtime during updates, and increased risks of human error.
• Limited Scalability: As user demand grows and services expand, the infrastructure struggles to scale effectively, leading to performance degradation during high-traffic periods.
• Lack of Automation in Infrastructure Provisioning: The manual approach to infrastructure provisioning and management is inefficient. It slows down the ability to adapt rapidly to changes and increases the operational burden on the development team.

These challenges prevent the platform from achieving the scalability, performance, and agility needed to support its growing user base and services. A shift towards a more automated, cost-effective, and scalable infrastructure is crucial to overcome these limitations and enable long-term growth and success.

Our Solution: A Cloud-Native Approach to Scalability and Performance

We proposed a comprehensive solution leveraging AWS services to address Investiaa’s operational challenges and enable its future growth.

This solution focuses on automation, scalability, performance optimization, and security:

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform: Automate the provisioning, configuration, and management of AWS infrastructure resources (VPCs, subnets, security groups, EC2 instances, ECS clusters, load balancers, EFS, etc.) using Terraform.
• GitHub Actions: Automate the build, test, and deployment pipeline triggered by code changes in the GitHub repository. 
• Autoscaling: Configure ECS clusters to automatically scale the number of instances based on workload demands, ensuring optimal resource utilization and performance.Load Balancing: Use Application Load Balancers to distribute incoming traffic across multiple ECS tasks, improving fault tolerance and scalability.Amazon MQ: Utilized Amazon MQ as a managed message broker to handle asynchronous communication between services, improving scalability and reliability.

• Amazon EFS: Amazon EFS is used for shared, persistent storage across multiple ECS tasks and EC2 instances, simplifying data management and ensuring data durability.Security Best Practices: Implemented strong security measures, including IAM roles with least-privilege access, security groups to control network traffic, and encryption of sensitive data at rest and in transit.
• Security Best Practices: Implemented strong security measures, including IAM roles with least-privilege access, security groups to control network traffic, and encryption of sensitive data at rest and in transit.
• Amazon CloudWatch: Monitor the performance of ECS clusters, EC2 instances, and application components.

By adopting these strategies and leveraging AWS services, Investiaa can significantly improve its operational efficiency, scalability, and performance, ultimately enhancing user experience and driving business growth.

Benefits

By implementing this solution, there was a significant improvement in the platform’s infrastructure, deployment processes, and performance. The anticipated benefits include:

Increased Efficiency and Reliability:

• Accelerated Development and Deployment: Faster release cycles and reduced lead time from commit to production.
• Reduced Downtime: Zero-downtime deployments and improved mean recovery time (MTTR).
• Enhanced Infrastructure Reliability: Increased mean time between failures (MTBF) and reduced change failure rate.

Improved Performance and User Experience:

• Enhanced Software Performance: Reduced response times and improved overall application performance.
• Optimized Resource Utilization: More efficient resource allocation and cost reduction.

Enhanced Security and Compliance:

• More assertive Security Posture: Eliminated long-term access keys and adherence to least-privilege access principles.
• Improved Security Compliance: Increased compliance with industry security standards.

Improved Operational Efficiency and Monitoring:

• Automated CI/CD Pipelines: Increased build success rates, test coverage, and reduced manual intervention.
• Proactive Issue Detection and Resolution: Enhanced monitoring and faster incident resolution times.

Results

The successful implementation of the new infrastructure has resulted in significant improvements across various key performance indicators (KPIs):

• Uptime: The platform has maintained a 99.9% uptime, ensuring high availability and minimal service disruptions.
• Deployment Efficiency:The build success rate has exceeded 95%, streamlining the deployment process.The mean time to recovery (MTTR) has been reduced by 50%, enabling faster issue resolution and minimizing downtime.
• The build success rate has exceeded 95%, streamlining the deployment process.
• The mean time to recovery (MTTR) has been reduced by 50%, enabling faster issue resolution and minimizing downtime.
• Performance:Application response times have been reduced by 60%, enhancing user experience.The infrastructure has demonstrated the ability to handle a 50% increase in traffic without compromising performance.
• Application response times have been reduced by 60%, enhancing user experience.
• The infrastructure has demonstrated the ability to handle a 50% increase in traffic without compromising performance.
• Security:GitHub OIDC has been fully integrated, strengthening security practices.Long-term access keys have been eliminated, reducing security risks.
• GitHub OIDC has been fully integrated, strengthening security practices.
• Long-term access keys have been eliminated, reducing security risks.

By focusing on these key metrics, the project has successfully delivered a more efficient, reliable, and secure platform, enabling Investiaa to scale effectively and meet future growth demands.