We're a native AWS customer and a provider as well. We have multiple solutions running in there, and we are also doing infrastructure as a code and infrastructure as a service. For example, we can offer you lower prices than the price that you would pay for an AWS instance because we are an official partner of Amazon. So, we are taking all the advantages of what we currently have with AWS.
It is being used for ECM. In terms of deployment, from an AWS perspective, it is partly self-developed based on Terraform, and we are also using services like S3, S9, and all the things we have in AWS for DNS, but it is highly automated. When a customer comes in and says that they need an instance clustered with certain options and a certain amount of service, it's usually firing up one line of code, and then everything gets set up, including the infrastructure.
We're working with its newer version.
Scalability is one of the biggest benefits we have.
We have a very good approach internally with what we have developed. It involved overcoming some hurdles regarding the single point of truth or single point of configuration, which is sometimes not that easy for AWS. There are dashboards and you have your web service, but bringing all these together and orchestrating is sometimes quite difficult.
My estimate is six years, but it might be way earlier. We ramped up way early with AWS on the market and developed together with them.
It is very scalable. Our customers are from every corner you can imagine. There is no specific type of customers we are serving.
We have a direct relationship with AWS. We are not running with the usual support with AWS. We have other possibilities and are directly integrated.
It is easy. With our solution, it's really a piece of cake. Even my seven-year-old would be able to set up a cluster with high availability, as long as I tell her what to enter.
It is quite expensive in my very personal opinion. Going on-prem in a data center is, for sure, not as expensive as going to AWS, but when it comes to a point where you are raising and growing, it simply makes a lot of sense to stay in AWS. It is awesome in that way. I am not aware of any extra costs.
Azure is something that we are currently looking into as a second option, but there are no concrete actions planned.
It boils down to two points. The first point would be to have correct planning. You need to know what you want to do and you need to be familiar with what you can do in AWS. The second very important point is that you need very stable and very good monitoring of your AWS instances. This is mandatory because if you fire up a very expensive environment and forget it over weeks, you need to pay for that. I've seen a lot of companies struggling to get an overview of all these AWS machines. It starts by tagging and so on.
I would rate it an eight out of ten.
Wow, Aimee, it's great to know you have a 'no complaint' sentiment about AWS!
Given that you had originally spent what sounds like a large amount of time dealing with customer service, how did they succeed in delivering you to a place where you have 'no complaints' about the platform?