Helpphone: Disaster Recovery and Data Backup with AWS

The Challenge

In this project our customer’s main goals were to provide a means to ensure continuous service delivery and to preserve all the collected data even in case of disaster at the main site of operation. AWS provides a wide range of services from relational and non-relational databases to store customer data, to networking and infrastructure to provide computation and communication all with natively integrated monitoring.

Having that in mind our team knew that AWS was the right choice for this project. With AWS platform our team was able to provide a redundant system to ensure continuous service availability, even in case of disaster, the means to manage, monitor, and store safely all the unique Data essential for Helpphone to provide its service.

The Solution

Devoteam A Cloud has analysed all of our client’s needs and with that in mind started the Disaster Recovery and Data Backup.

The team designed and implemented a disaster recovery solution by providing a redundant system with recurrent Database replication, allowing the customer access to an alternative functional environment with a complete data replica set, in case of disaster. The system was designed according to AWS best practices and implemented by using infrastructure automation tools, in this case, Terraform.

Terraform is an infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that lets you define both cloud and on-prem resources in human-readable configuration files that can be versioned, reused, and shared. By creating a custom resource for Terraform, our team was able to control public cloud resources programmatically and by using it with a consistent workflow it was possible to provision and manage the infrastructure lifecycle. The use of Terraform allows our team to be faster by eliminating the manual process.

The advantage of using infrastructure as a code tool is that your configurations also become your documentation. Breaking down the infrastructure into components makes it easier to read and update your infrastructure as it grows.

Another feature that our team used was Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) because, this feature allows us to have full control over the virtual networking environment, including resource placement, connectivity, and security. Enables us to launch AWS resources into a virtual network that the client defined. This virtual network closely resembles a traditional network that you’d operate in your own data center, with the benefits of using the scalable infrastructure of AWS. When you create a VPC, it comes with a default security group.
You can create additional security groups for each VPC. You can associate a security group only with resources in the VPC for which it is created. For each security group, we add rules that control the traffic based on protocols and port numbers.

Another attribute that our team chose to use was Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Amazon S3 is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. We use Amazon S3 to store and retrieve any amount of data at any time, from anywhere. Amazon S3 has various features that allow us to organise and manage data in ways that support specific use cases, enable cost efficiencies, enforce security, and meet compliance requirements. Data is stored as objects within resources called “buckets”, and a single object can be up to 5 terabytes in size.

To help us perform the Data Backup our team use AWS Backup to enable centralisation and automate data protection across services and hybrid workloads. AWS Backup offers a cost-effective, fully managed, policy-based service that further simplifies data protection at scale. AWS Backup also helps us to support the client’s regulatory compliance and business policies for data protection.

DEPENDENCIES:

• PHP
• PYTHON
• APACHE
• MYSQL
• DATABASE