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Lovinmalta is one of the leading news portals on the Maltese Islands. The portal also acts as an alternative guide to Malta and Gozo - celebrating the Maltese islands, their food and the people who shape them.
The challenge with Lovinmalta involved very tight project deadlines as well as the possibility of very fast surges of visitors when there is breaking news. The portal commonly has 5 to 10x traffic surges within a few minutes of breaking news. Since, for cost saving reasons, having a large pool of servers waiting for such traffic surges was not possible or ideal, another solution had to be found.
Lovinmalta and 56Bit, decided to solve this issue by eliminating the need to do any significant predictions in the first place. By using AWS's very mature, and ever-growing portfolio of container orchestration products we were able to provide a highly redundant, scalable and secure system whilst fully controlling costs.
After evaluating various options, AWS was chosen as the public cloud provider of choice. The reason was not just based on costs, which were considerably less when compared like with like, but also the maturity, scalability potential and unparalleled feature set provided by the AWS service portfolio.
56Bit provides peace of mind to technology-driven business through best-in-class cloud solutions. Lovinmalta, whose core business is totally dependent on the underlying technology required an experienced partner with profound knowledge on serverless technologies that could deliver a high-quality service on time and within budget. Lovinmalta teamed up with 56Bit to consult, design, build and maintain this platform, working hand-in-hand with the software development team.
The solution is based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework and includes the following components:
Amazon ECS is used to orchestrate the containerized backend logic and frontend dynamic html logic. All containers, connected to VPCs, are run on multiple AZs to ensure high availability and maximum scalability. Very aggressive and strict scaling policies are used to scale the underlying EC2 hosts and the overlying containers. Multiple lambda functions are also used for internal tasks such as Development and Staging environment switch on and off which is key to reducing costs.
Amazon RDS (Aurora engine with MySQL compatibility) was chosen to host a fully managed cluster of MySQL servers on multiple availability zones.
Amazon S3 is used as a static file storage system. Considering it was designed with 99.99% availability and 99.999999999% (that's 11 x 9s!) durability, the decision was easy. Multiple buckets, some fronted by the Amazon CloudFront CDN are used for image hosting, logging and other miscellaneous uses.
Implement a Disaster Recovery (DR) solution that handles region-wide failures. Whilst the system is already highly-available, since everything runs in multiple AZs, this can be improved further with a cross-region solution. It will not be very hard to move to another region, since everything is implemented using IaC.
At the moment we do not envisage the need for database caching, but a database caching layer can easily be spun up using AWS Elasticache (Redis) to add a very fast caching layer between the ECS compute and the RDS database. This will increase performance, reduce database hosting costs and decouple the architecture even further.
Moving to AWS Fargate (for ECS) and using Aurora Serverless (for Mysql) would remove all manual management of the underlying servers and provide us with the space to focus on improving and monitoring the infrastructure.