When Startups are growing quickly and facing aggressive timelines, minimum viable products (MVPs) experience issues, such as data loss, performance degradation, and multiple failures with inadequate troubleshooting. Startups that are working with semi-monolithic containerized solutions face challenges with management and scalability. Even if monolithic solutions are in containers, they require constant application rebooting, and scaling is still a challenge. Not all containerized solutions have scaling issues if executed properly.
Multitenancy approaches to client platforms can be rudimentary and create a single point of failure. Any application downtime will affect all the clients, disrupting the service for everybody. Rapidly growing Startups with business-to-business (B2B) models or that offer software as a service (SaaS) products need a scalable client platform solution so they can add more and larger clients to their portfolio and achieve future success.
Taking a cloud-native approach to application architecture using AWS Serverless technologies enables Startups to focus on business value and product performance metrics to build technical solutions, shortening development cycles and go-to-market timelines.
Many Startups need a platform that functions as a real SaaS or B2B solution. The new architecture needs to meet certain requirements related to the transactional database.
Ideally, each tenant should be isolated from the others. The data and other assets should be unique and only accessible to a particular tenant.
A new client should be onboarded quickly, regardless of the geographical region. Future phases should be accomplished in hours or even minutes.
A particular tenant should have custom business logic and composing integrations. Each tenant should be capable of enriching the data models with custom data fields and supporting foreign data structures from the integrating platforms.
Service level agreements (SLAs) and performance metrics need to be standard for all tenants. A higher utilization client shouldn’t affect other accounts.
All transactions must be auditable.
A cloud-native architecture for Startups can be realized through AWS and Amazon DynamoDB. AWS Serverless technologies and DynamoDB provide multi-account mechanisms to address the multitenant-related requirements Startups have for B2B platforms.
As a cloud vendor, AWS offers potential beyond infrastructure and hosting. AWS can serve as a cloud platform for application integration as well. When they invest in AWS, Startups can rely on out-of-the-box features and configurations. A design that takes an API-led first approach with a Microservices architecture can be implemented with Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda.
Developers at Startups can use DynamoDB to build modern, serverless applications that can start small and scale globally to support petabytes of data and tens of millions of read and write requests per second. DynamoDB is designed to run high-performance, internet-scale applications that would put a strain on traditional relational databases.
Amazon DynamoDB is a fast, flexible NoSQL and fully managed database service for single-digit millisecond performance. With the support of key-value and document data structures, DynamoDB provides the flexibility to store enriched data models for customization, which is very useful in SaaS solutions. DynamoDB also offers high durability and availability across multiple data centers natively.
AWS cloud-native architecture, including AWS DynamoDB, API Gateway, Lambda, SNS, and SQS, meets the demands of a growing Startup.
When DynamoDB serves as the No-SQL database, the solution keeps writing and reading times constant and keeps the schema flexibility of the data stored, allowing some premium clients to use different data models. The consistency provided by DynamoDB is a crucial factor in designing asynchronous transactions that help scale volume substantially.
Dedicated tables for each tenant isolate data and to ensure that no other tenant can access others’ tables via access control lists at the AWS Account, Amazon DynamoDB Service, and Tables.
This approach helps guarantee consistent SLAs for each AWS Account, since tenants don’t compete for service-limit quotas. Instead, control is given in throughput, and extra capacity of the service limits is reserved for unexpected bursts of read or write transactions with the on-demand capacity feature.
Amazon API Gateway is used for creating, publishing, maintaining, monitoring, and securing REST and WebSocket APIs at any scale. With Amazon API Gateway, developers can create APIs for use in their own client applications or they can make Web APIs available to third-party app developers. Amazon API Gateway enables developers to provide a secure and highly configurable entry point to other resources and applications inside AWS or other platforms.
AWS Lambda is a Serverless computing platform that makes it easy for developers to build applications using their own code. Lambda is a fully managed service, so no administration is needed. Lambda is ideal for event-driven architectures. Architectures can be executed on demand or based on configured triggers from events. With Lambda you experience a FaaS (Function as a Service) platform where you just write the code and pay only for the compute time you consume.
Amazon SQS enables Startups to increase application reliability and scale by providing a simple and reliable way for customers to decouple and connect microservices together using queues.
Amazon SNS works with other AWS services, such as Amazon SQS. Subscribers can select Amazon SQS as a delivery protocol and have notifications delivered to multiple SQS queues in parallel, providing persistence of messages and guaranteed delivery. Messages can be delivered to AWS Lambda functions for handling message customizations, enabling message persistence or communication with other AWS services.
When workloads are designed following a serverless approach, Startups shorten development cycles and deliver projects on time despite aggressive deadlines and last-minute changes in requirements. As Startups continue onboarding new clients, new customizations can be included in the existing business logic and tables without disruptions, allowing the platform to be extended safely and quickly.
At IO Connect Services, we have a cloud-native manifest for Startups that focuses on business value and product performance metrics to build technical solutions. We are an APN Advanced Consulting Partner specializing in AWS Well-Architected Framework design principles and architectural best practices. Our certified team can help you design and run workloads in the cloud and build the most secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient applications infrastructure possible.
Find out how cloud-native architecture can help your company handle growth.Schedule an AWS Well-Architected Review from IO Connect.
