How the Cloud is Enabling the Disruption of the Construction Industry

Challenge

iQuippo was using costly on-premises infrastructure which needed to be regularly upgraded to match the surge in demand as the digital marketplace concept gained traction within the construction industry. Moreover, as the portal evolved, developers at the company were regularly releasing new builds almost weekly with new features and solutions. But they did not have sturdy release mechanisms or automated roll-back plans in place. Often, site users would experience bug- and human error-related issues and portal downtime.

Information security was also a concern, as iQuippo offered financing solutions through its tie-ups with banks and financial institutions. The portal had to meet the stringent financial data security requirements of the Reserve Bank of India. As part of an early initiative to reduce capital expenditure and address data security issues, iQuippo had decided to host its Disaster Recovery (DR) mechanisms on the cloud.

It approached Minfy, an AWS managed services specialist to help it do this. Later, as the benefits of cloud hosting became apparent, the scope of services increased to include architecting a comprehensive cloud solution for the core iQuippo application as well. To tackle the issues of bugs arising due to insufficiently streamlined development and release cycles, Minfy was also asked to help with end-to-end automation of the company’s software development processes which would follow DevOps best practices.

Solution

To tackle these challenges, Minfy, an AWS managed-services specialist, developed a robust and secure, DevOps compliant, AWS cloud-hosted infrastructure architecture. The high-level diagrams below provide an overview of the three-tiered application stack. Under the new scheme, the core iQuippo website application frontend uses Nginx webserver running on an Amazon Linux server with a backend MongoDB database. This setup would not require any build or deployment on the webservers as Nginx can also works as a reverse proxy server.

For the iQuippo backend, the app node is developed using JavaS-cript and the source code repository is maintained through AWS Code Commit. The source code is automatically built using Grunt on AWS CodeBuild, and deployed on AWS EC2 instances running in a virtual private cloud (VPC) using AWS CodeDeploy. The application architecture also includes Amazon Route 53, Amazon S3, and Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS IAM.

Benefit

The iQuippo marketplace now operates far more reliably and with zero downtime deployments. Because of the stability and excellent security features available on the portal, users can conduct large financial transactions without concern. Through hosting the portal on the AWS cloud, the portal is reaping the benefits of infrastructure and cost optimization, proactive monitoring, and continuous delivery.

The Minfy team continues to provide support through monitoring, detecting events, analysing and resolving issues, providing root cause analysis, and deploying needed changes. As iQuippo scales further, deploys even more innovative schemes and features, and expands into newer geographies, its reliable cloud-enabled infrastructure is enabling