Business Need

The client wanted to implement an online auction platform for optimizing its procurement, bidding, and tendering processes. The vision was to facilitate more transparent, efficient, and competitive project allocation with a platform that can not only drive greater value and progress for the state’s infrastructure and industrial sectors but also deliver a seamless user experience. Considering the online bidding requirement, the platform had to be available and accessible by large number of participants, across multiple locations in real-time, it had to be scalable with 99.99% uptime.

Business Challenge

The client was hosting its servers at a co-location facility. Their existing infrastructure setup failed to provide the necessary 99.99% uptime, leading to persistent high latency issues. As a result, online auctions suffered from frequent cancellations, causing significant revenue losses. The client needed a solution to improve platform performance, scalability, and availability, reduce losses, and regain the trust of bidders and stakeholders in the auction process.

Business Solution

To enhance the auction platform’s performance and reliability, NuSummit assessed its functionality, business value, technical debt, maintenance costs, usage patterns, and future compatibility using application portfolio rationalization services. Based on the reports of this analysis, we planned and executed the platform’s migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and implemented various cloud-native solutions based on the assessment recommendations. This involved:

Scalability improvements by:

• Enabling auto scalability and horizontal scaling to:
  • Handle changing user demands in the AWS environment.
  • Dynamically adjust resources for optimal performance during peak auction periods.
• Deploying Amazon EC2 Instances in a reliable and scalable computing environment for the auction platform.
• Implementing an Application Load Balancer within Amazon EC2 instances for efficient load balancing and improved user experiences.
• Employing Amazon S3 standard storage for secure and efficient object storage of auction-related data.

Security improvements by:

• Configuring a robust disaster recovery plan for high availability and failover to safeguard against disruptions and minimize downtime.
• Utilizing Network Address Translation (NAT) for secure internet access to private subnet resources, enhancing overall security.
• Implementing AWS Tier-4 security architecture using a well-architected framework to address data security concerns.
• Implementing OpenVPN for secure access to EC2 instances and private subnet resources via a Bastion Host.
• Setting up site-to-site VPN for secure network connectivity between the client’s office and AWS environment.
• Provisioning CloudWatch to comprehensively monitor instances and network activities, enabling proactive issue detection and resolution.
• Deploying AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to filter web requests based on specific conditions, ensuring security, and monitoring the Auction Platform login page against unauthorized access using compromised credentials.
• Utilizing Amazon GuardDuty as a continuous threat detection service for:
  • Monitoring the client’s AWS account and workloads.
  • Providing detailed security findings.
  • Facilitating effective remediation actions to bolster peripheral security.

Tech Stack