The company chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its infrastructure to take advantage of the automation that AWS offers. “By using AWS, our team can focus on pushing our products forward, not on fighting infrastructure,” Baird says. “AWS offered what we wanted in terms of a virtual data center through a virtual private cloud.” The team appreciated AWS’s commitment to supporting customer due diligence on rplan as a supplier as well as the many developments made to the service, particularly

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) volumes and the integration between Amazon Route 53 and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB). rplan is using PIOPS to provide guaranteed and predictable disk read times for its OLTP databases. “The Route 53 and Amazon ELB integration gives us management convenience in terms of web server cluster management,” Baird adds.

In 2011, rplan started with a single host in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud-Classic (Amazon EC2 Classic). Shortly thereafter, it designed and implemented an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environment and has since increased the number of hosts within it. Baird notes, “For Amazon EC2 Classic, there was virtually no learning curve.”

The company now uses an Amazon VPC environment spread across three Availability Zones, to support 15–20 Windows and Linux hosts. The architecture is organized in a traditional web stack, with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections terminating on ELB, multiple web servers in different Availability Zones, and a primary database server that replicates its state to a secondary server in a separate Availability Zone. The infrastructure includes two installations of this stack supporting five production websites. Other servers support these installations, including build and deployment, proxy, and monitoring and patch deployment servers. Static content hosting is offloaded to Amazon CloudFront, and the team uses Amazon RDS to host some offline analytics features and Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) to send client email. See Figure 1.