Cost optimization for a web application backend.

Customer

UK based boutique travel company specialising in treks in Nepal. 

Challenge 

With the onset of the Covid pandemic, the travel industry came to a grinding halt.  We were approached by the client to help re-architect and re-implement their 3 tier web application to leverage serverless paradigm and reduce costs.

Solution

As the major emphasis was on cost reduction, it was decided that majority of the application will be re implemented as a serverless application. 

For the web layer of the application, which was implemented in React, it was decided to redeploy the application using Cloudfront and S3. For the application and database layer, functionality was divided into mission-critical and non-mission critical workloads.

The mission-critical workloads were implemented by our client's team  as a NodeJS application on reserved  EC2 using RDS as a database, in a highly available configuration with load balancing. Consistent with their previous architecture, and human resource capabilities. Non mission critical workloads were reimplemented by us using API Gateway, AWS Lambda, S3 and DynamoDB

Results

This directly resulted in 90% reduction in AWS costs.