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AWS Case Study: HustleSasa — Migration to AWS

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About the Customer

HustleSasa is the number one mobile-first platform that allows entrepreneurs to start and develop online and offline businesses. They enable businesses to build and manage storefronts, integrate with third-party payment providers, and manage orders across various channels at zero setup costs and zero monthly fees.

The Challenge

As part of its growth strategy, HustleSasa intended to expand its user base and required its application to be scalable.

Having initially maintained their mobile application hosted on a competitor’s public cloud platform, HustleSasa consulted Silicon Overdrive to explore a way forward on AWS that aligned with best practices.

After careful consideration, Silicon Overdrive proposed rehosting HustleSasa’s application to AWS. This migration would best allow HustleSasa to benefit from integrated AWS notifications, live streaming services, improve scalability, and data sovereignty by deploying to the Cape Town (South Africa) region.

With costs being a challenge, HustleSasa was able to leverage AWS startup funding options as a result of engaging with Silicon Overdrive. By engaging with a Partner, HustleSasa reduced its migration and usage costs.

Having decided to migrate to AWS, it was imperative for HustleSasa to adopt a best practice architecture for its workloads.

The Solution

Silicon Overdrive implemented environments that leveraged setting up a Single-Availability Zone deployment for development and staging to ensure it was cost-efficient while still allowing the customer to adequately test their solution before promoting it to production.

The production environment was deployed with a Multi-Availability Zone set up to ensure that they were able to operate their production applications and databases in a way that is more highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable than a single data center solution.

Silicon Overdrive deployed AWS Fargate, Elastic Container (ECS), and Multi AZ RDS (PostgreSQL) instances to complement this highly available architecture best.

Given that AWS Fargate on ECS Containers is a managed service, HustleSasa was able to gain operational efficiencies as they no longer needed to provision, configure, or scale clusters of virtual machines to run their application on containers.

To assist in meeting the standards of the AWS Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR), AWS GuardDuty, a security monitoring service that analyzes and processes data logs, was deployed. The architecture conformed to a general security best practice implementation and generated a high score on ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and NIST reports.

Terraform was used to develop deployable modules for each of the services in use that can be used in the event of Disaster Recovery or scaling HustleSasa’s business to redeploy the environment to any AWS Region (where underlying services are supported). The repository of these Terraform scripts was customized for the customer and shared with HustleSasa as a project deliverable.

Silicon Overdrive assisted the developers in an advisory capacity to integrate their application with the deployed AWS services, setting up the ECS Clusters and the respective Namespaces, pushing container images to ECR, and deploying containers to ECS.

A Trend Micro Cloud One – Conformity assessment was conducted to validate HustleSasa’s security and compliance posture after the migration was completed. Proactive measures were taken to enhance the security of their AWS resources.

The Outcome

Following the migration, HustleSasa has operated its workload at the highest levels of availability and performance at the lowest possible cost.

Outages now result in automatic failover without the intervention of technical staff or impact on users. This enables the company to focus on new features for their product instead of keeping the lights on.

User experience has improved substantially due to elasticity and effective load balancing that ensures resources are made available during periods of increased load. Cost is optimized as resources are scaled back when the load reverts to normal levels. This has enabled HustleSasa to efficiently meet the demands as they expand their customer base.

By incorporating security features into the development and design of their applications, HustleSasa met AWS Security’s best practices. These included using permissions boundaries to delegate, applying least-privilege access, and rotation of access keys, to mention a few.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework Review assessment has empowered HustleSasa management with tools that provide valuable insights, which allows them to restructure their business priorities in line with compliance standards and optimize their operational components.

Michael Denuh, CTO of HustleSasa, said, “They are very professional and have a good handle on the technical workings of AWS.”

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AWS Case Study

AWS Case Study: HustleSasa — Migration to AWS

About the Customer

The Challenge

The Solution

The Outcome

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