Parijat Challenge
Parijat was having a collocated Data Centre. The servers included the mix of Application and Database servers to maintain the data, which comprises of CRM applications, product images, the dynamic data to maintain the compete track of their products range, clients & research related to laboratory test in Bio-efficacy trials of pesticides carried out in in-vitro & in-vivo condition associated with Parijat. Although Parijat had sufficient resources to manage with their existing IT needs, but the zeal towards fully digitization where the Parijat could address the challenges faced such as high availability, scalability of their application servers and databases, across the Globe for assisting their clients in meeting their ongoing and developing needs encouraged Parijat to move on the cloud services for CRM applications which could address the advance digital needs & challenges.
Why AWS Architecture
Use Case : Backup with Technology Partner Solution – Veeam Backup
They started their digital journey by developing & hosting their CRM application servers on cloud services. While Parijat liked the elasticity of the cloud, it had some issues of auto-scaling with its previous cloud provider. After a deep analysis and understanding of the services offered by CSP, Parijat decided to move on AWS which could address their customized applications and surveys needs for the end user’s reachability, research forum, the digitized publication activities and the updation of the dynamic and ever-growing data on AWS resources which shall maintain the Parijat’s data in scalable and secured manner and off course in cost optimized manner.
To meet the upcoming challenges faced by Parijat Group due to their limited collocated IT resources, Parijat with the assistance of their Cloud Services Partner started exploring the best feasible options to move on cloud with much better clarity about the scalability, resilience, reliability and availability of the hosted IT resources with Unicloud Labs & decided to move on AWS cloud services and developed a completely new environment to cater the need of hosting the application servers and data storage on AWS which could help them manage their project as a digital flagship program. In addition to that, the backup for the resources was also considered to avoid any fatal data loss on account of disaster.
The Parijat Group repository is a cloud-native solution, with the front-end web app separated from the backend API. It runs as immutable infrastructure in a fully automated environment, with all infrastructure defined in code to support for building and managing online surveys and databases. Parijat Group has developed its own customized web app “Parijat Kisan” for farmers in India hosted on AWS cloud in a flexible & scalable backup infrastructure that protects all data types in another region with the implementation of Veeam Backup technology solution which has resulted in the cost optimized backup solution by replacing the old backup method such as Tape Library to store the data backup. The data backup generated with the help of Veeam backup solution is now getting stored in S3 in much controlled and secure manner with minimum productivity loss commitment to overcome any fatal data loss on account of any unavoidable disaster event.
Parijat Group is using the following AWS services for this flagship project.
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Using Amazon EC2 eliminates your need to invest in hardware up front, so you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need to configure security and networking, and manage storage. Parijat uses this service to host their application servers.
- Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB), which automatically distributes your incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in one or more Availability Zones. It monitors the health of its registered targets, and routes traffic only to the healthy targets. Elastic Load Balancing scales your load balancer as your incoming traffic changes over time. It can automatically scale to most workloads. Parijat uses this service for managing the incoming traffic across the multiple targets in the Parijat application.
- AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) offers a range of storage classes for the objects that you store. You choose a class depending on your use case scenario and performance access requirements. All these storage classes offer high durability. Parijat uses S3 service to store their dynamic & critical data pertaining to the laboratory & research results. The data backup generated with Veeam Backup solution is getting stored in S3 which may be used for data restoration in case of any fatal failure. In addition to that S3 has been configured for the data backup & restoration process by implementing the AWS best recommended practices such as IAM roles & least privilege deployment, bucket versioning, Encryption, S3 Optimization- Tagging, Metrics & Performance Monitoring, Multivolume Backups, Database Replica Backups with proper versioning and defined retention period.
- Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the AWS Cloud. It provides Parijat group the cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.
- Amazon Cloud Trail (Cloud Trail) is an AWS service that helps you enable governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of your AWS account. Actions taken by a user, role, or an AWS service are recorded as events in CloudTrail. Events include actions taken in the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface, and AWS SDKs and APIs. Parijat uses this service for their governance & compliance and auditing concerns.
- AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is an encryption and key management service scaled for the cloud.AWS KMS keys and functionality are used by other AWS services, and you can use them to protect data in your own applications that use AWS. Parijat uses this service for managing their keys pertaining to AWS services.
- AWS Secrets Manager, which helps to securely encrypt, store and retrieve credentials for your databases and other services. Instead of hardcoding credentials in your app, you can make calls to Secrets Manager to retreive your credentials whenever needed.Secrets Manager helps you protect access to your IT resources and data by enabling you to rotate and manage access to your secrets. Parijat uses this service for protecting their secret keys which are mapped with their applications and IT resources to manage their security as per best AWS recommended standards.
The Benefits
By using AWS, The Parijat Group has a flexible, highly available, scalable environment that allows it to concentrate on expanding its business, while maintaining an excellent user experience. A CRM Application Server(s) with its application its dynamic data for the future. Through its use of AWS, with support from Unicloud Labs Pvt Ltd, Parijat is making it vast wealth of products responses, pictures, videos and audio files - easily discoverable in one centralized location, delivering these benefits.
- Built-in Scalability. All components of the Parijat CRM are built to scale on demand, as needed to handle usage spikes. “On-demand scalability will be invaluable for events such as the need for product responses to meet the products demands. Parijat has really benefitted not only on operational but also on the financial ends during Corona Virus pandemic.
- Offloading infrastructure concerns keeps developers focused on improving API. By building CRM application in the cloud, Parijat avoided the costs associated with deploying and maintaining server and storage hardware in-house. Instead, Updated API improves customer experience and speeds page-load times which directly boosted the productivity of the developers of Parijat and encouraged them to look around the more innovative ideas in their field.
While Parijat’ s new CRM application delivers a wealth of new convenience and capabilities, for their end users and keeps on expanding with exceptional results. “