The commercial real estate segment is fast changing, becoming more adoptive of advanced technologies that make data management easier and faster. CRETech is just a case in point. Being one of the leading technical solution providers to the commercial real estate agencies and brokers, it already had a vision to change its operation ecosystem to make it more client-specific in terms of data storage, security etc.
Upgrading their existing systems for accurate file management was CRETech’s biggest challenge. While the reports were generated by the client themselves, downloading them or sharing them with other devices was not smooth. Moreover, the systems crashed under pressure. They had server storage of their own, which needed advanced fortification and was costly.
As Amazon professional services consultant, we emphasized that all APIs, databases, and the entire web application are hosted and managed in the cloud. Our responsibility was to maintain all these apps, develop new features and periodically re-develop a few apps to offer different business needs.
We used multiple technologies as amazon web services developers to support these different apps. Scheduled tasks for synchronizing data from different external API like Buildout, Facility. We integrated with FEMA Environmental API services. Also, several services were used from ESRI ArcGIS to implement the features offered.
We identified the problem and shifted to EC2 instances for hosting the APIs and the websites and RDS have been used for the database. We have an automatic daily backup system configured in RDS. For request queuing, we used RabbitMQ. For storing files we have introduced S3 which was both cost-effective and truly elastic by nature. Additionally, it was more secured than their existing storage system.
The client used generic purpose instances, which was not optimized for high memory and high CPU applications. We monitored their systems for occasional CPU spikes, memory performance and suggested they used the most optimum instance for their actual memory and CPU requirement. Previously the client application was running without any other security layer. We analyzed the system further for possible threats and vulnerabilities and implemented the right security architecture.
The user base of the apps and the websites increased significantly over time as we constantly developed new features and strategically managed the load of the increased user base.
We closely monitored the performance metrics and analyzed the peak hours and based on the data, we selected the right EC2 and RDS instances needed for the application. We have added external volumes for increased demand for space in the server. We have changed the file storing from EC2 to S3 to normalize the cost and effectively manage the files in the server.
The project was a challenge to remember and learn from. Commercial Real Estate Industry runs on very complex calculations. And resource-intense, heavy reports are usually the outcome of any CRE tool. So the challenge here was to always maintain an optimum blend of the computational powerhouse instances and high memory optimized instances, which needs a deep understanding of the instance families, their capabilities and costs.What we learnt was exemplary- patience, perseverance, and the keenness to deep dive are the key to close a project successfully.
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