Dotmetrics Case Study

Dotmetrics Case Study

Dometrics Moves to the AWS Cloud and Improves Scalability, Elasticity, and Agility with Powerful Automation Features.

Intro

Dotmetrics is a software company that specializes in audience measurement solutions and operates in 6 countries. In 2019, the company won the tender for an official measurement system for the UK media. This new business expansion brought unique needs for flexibility, scalability, and performance. Heptabit proposed a solution based on the AWS cloud with more than 25 specialized services.

About Dotmetrics

Dotmetrics is a software company specialized in audience measurement solutions based on BigData technology. In 2012, the company took the opportunity to build an audience measurement solution with Google's BigQuery. In 2013, Dotmetrics joined forces with Ipsos - the largest regional market research Agency. In 2015, Dotmetrics started official measurement in Croatia; other countries such as Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina soon followed.

Today, Dotmetrics is one of the leading big data site-centric audience measurement system, operating in 6 countries.

The Problem

Dotmetrics's big data audience measurement solution has been hosted in our own Hepta cloud. As the needs for performance and scalability increased, the Hepta cloud was no longer an option. The company needed more scalability, automation, and elasticity.

In 2019, the company won the tender for an official measurement system for the UK media. This new contract only accelerated the decision to migrate from the Hepta cloud to AWS.

Why AWS Cloud?

AWS cloud, as the biggest hyper-cloud, offers a range of specialized services and availability across the globe. The needs for elasticity and scalability are incomparable to any other cloud solution. Powerful automation tools help in the automation of the release process.

Solution

We approached this project as a technology partner where we used the scalable architecture consisting of more than 25 specialized AWS services.

• Route 53 - highly available and scalable cloud DNS web service used for public and private DNS zones.
• Elastic load balancer (ELB) - application load balancer.
• CloudFront - Amazon's content delivery network (CDN).
• Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) - service for provisioning, management, and deployment of SSL and TLS certificates.
• S3 - Amazon's simple storage services is used as a logging endpoint for CloudFront and ELB and application output.
• S3 Glacier - specialized backup storage.
• Amazon Athena - log analysis and ad-hoc reporting for application output logs stored in S3.
• Amazon QuickSight - business intelligence service for data visualization and interactive dashboards.
• Amazon EMR - big data platform for data processing, used for application output analysis.
• Amazon EC2 - compute capacity used to host CouchBase.
• Amazon RDS - Amazon's relational database service is used for the MSSQL workload.
• Amazon Elastic Container Service - managed container orchestration service used together with Amazon Fargate.
• CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, and CodeBuild - deployment automation tools.
• Amazon Elastic Container Registry - managed Docker container registry.
• Amazon CloudWatch - monitoring and observability service for developers, IT managers, and engineers.
• Amazon SES - a simple email service used as an outgoing email service.
• Amazon SNS - simple notification services used for email and Slack notifications.
• AWS Client VPN - VPN client that uses AD for authorization.
• AWS Identity & Access Management (IAM) - identity access management.
• AWS Directory Service - Managed Microsoft Active Directory in AWS used for authentication and authorization.
• AWS Lambda - compute service used for various tasks.
• AWS Systems Manager - visibility, control, and patch management.
• AWS Transit Gateway - a network transit hub used to connect VPC's.
• AWS Backup - managed backup solution.

We used autoscaling groups and an EC2 instance fleet for combining on-demand and spot instances.

Results and Benefits

• Elasticity - the company can simply increase memory and CPU resources or change service instances, or add new services.
• Scalability - horizontal and vertical scalability is improved significantly with autoscaling groups.
• Deployment automation - we used all available deployment automation to create an efficient and fully automated deployment solution.
• Backup - With AWS Backup, we created a fully managed backup solution.
• Logging - with superior logging levels, the solution brought an increase in overall systems visibility.
• Reliability - the AWS's high availability makes the system more reliable.
• Efficiency - with the introduction of various AWS tools, the whole development cycle became more efficient.
• Security - AWS's fine grain security mechanism brought an increase in security levels.

Next Steps

The migration project went very successfully, and the cooperation continues as the application continually evolves. The flexibility and increased scalability that we brought with AWS changed the whole development lifecycle.

Heptabit will continue to act as a technology partner by helping Dotmetrics focus on application development instead of infrastructure maintenance and provisioning.

About Heptabit

Heptabit is a company based in Croatia, focused on providing high-end IT services based on cloud technology. The company's strategy focuses on its own cloud solution called 'Hepta cloud' and Amazon AWS services.

With strong customer orientation, the company acts as a technology partner to its clients and provides a high level of expertise and knowledge in the domain of IT infrastructure solutions.

In 2018, the company joined Amazon Partner Network; since then, Heptabit steadily built its current position as one of the leading AWS partners in the CEE region.

The company's services are provided in accordance with the leading IT management and IT security ISO certificates (ISO 20000, ISO27000, ISO27017).

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