Success Story

Modernizing database architecture for a custom software development provider’s low-code application.

About the Client

The client is a grants management and custom software development provider that works with public and private firms across key industries such as energy, defense, healthcare, emergency management, etc. Established in 2013 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the provider specializes in streamlined data management using powerful tools customized to fit the standards of the specific organization and industry. It is the foremost data management partner for federal government agencies and Fortune 500 publicly traded companies worldwide.

Services Used:

Application Modernization Amazon RDS Solutions

Business Situation

The provider needed to develop a low-code web application that could enable powerful data management for businesses. The data management solution would help organizations gain better data insights through customizable functionalities and automated workflows. However, the provider faced a range of challenges related to the web application’s high availability, synchronization, inflated costs, and security vulnerabilities while setting up the database architecture.

The provider decided on Daffodil Software as a technology partner to overcome these hurdles due to its renowned expertise in the migration, management, security, and scaling of enterprise database architectures.

After a quick analysis of the data challenges faced by the client, Daffodil identified superior managed services of Amazon RDS as it would provide the perfect recourse to overcome the challenges faced by the provider. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed relational database service that simplifies the setup, management, deployment, and scaling of relational databases in the cloud. It was chosen to facilitate the following enhancements:

Enable high-availability of the web application for critical business processes
Synchronize primary data with all its replications for increased database stability
Opt for approaches that would reduce the cost of implementation
Fill the gaps in security and fulfill the need for better bug fixes
Prevent having to repeatedly establish new connections with the database
Manage server load during high traffic hours

The Solution

The Daffodil team implemented several improvements to the existing database architecture of the provider for optimizing the performance of their data management solution. The team leveraged various Amazon RDS solutions to lower database maintenance efforts, reduce infrastructure cost and downtime, and facilitated other capabilities such as the following:

Read-Write Replication

AWS Aurora MySQL was used to enforce a master-slave architecture so that read-write replication could be implemented. With this implementation, high-volume application read traffic could be served while avoiding the need to copy data to the replica nodes. This increased the aggregate read throughput making database scalability a simpler process and drastically reducing the possibility of data loss while scaling.

Auto Scaling

The data management application’s run on the database was monitored so that the capacity could be automatically adjusted to address scalability requirements. This helped maintain a steady, measurable, and predictable high-availability at the lowest cost possible. As the capacity scaling continued, the associated costs kept decreasing powered by Amazon Storage Auto Scaling.

Security Checks and Remediation

The AWS Security Hub and GuardDuty implementation services were leveraged to perform checks for best security practices. Whenever non-compliant and unencrypted resources as defined by AWS Config rules were found, swift remediation was carried out. This helped better prepare the database for future security threats and bugs through aggregated alerts.

Cost Management

The team utilized the AWS Cost Explorer to get a clear picture of the AWS costs and usage. The costs and usage were visualized at the high level as well as the level of EC2 instances and other low level resources. The top accounts and services and idle instances where the costs were the highest were identified so that proper resource optimization could be implemented and overall costs could be managed.

Load Balancing

ProxySQL was used to create a single endpoint for MySQL connections to utilize the connection pool effectively. It was set up for load balancing for improved availability with automatic failover. In case a hurdle was faced in establishing a connection to one of the database servers or if the server had been shut down for servicing, ProxySQL distributed traffic over multiple servers for quickly switching to a standby database server.

Impact

Daffodil Software’s implementation of Amazon RDS solutions facilitated superior database management outcomes for the provider. The infrastructure cost for RDS was reduced by 30%, and security was vastly improved. Moreover, connectivity and connection management have been optimized to further improve database performance, receiving massive appreciation from the client.