Executive Summary
Startup Monsters, an innovative company in the startup domain aiming to offer personalized content, is seeking a solution to enhance its engagement strategies. In this endeavour, we propose the implementation of Amazon Personalize, a powerful tool that caters to real-time traffic.
About the Customer
Enhancing digital experiences to an elevated level, Startup Monsters is a dedicated team of growth enthusiasts with a profound affinity for startups. Their expertise covers a wide array of areas, including UX and design, web development, online marketing, business expansion, viral concepts, and gamification. This equips them to effectively drive the venture's progress. Anchored in the Lean Startup Methodology, their unwavering inspiration propels them to create impactful solutions that resonate in today's dynamic business landscape.
Customer Challenge
The client, a media establishment with a daily blog post publication, aims to extend user engagement time and amplify impressions. Their goal is to achieve this by delivering real-time personalized content tailored to each user. To fulfil this requirement, the solution must rapidly scale while maintaining cost-efficiency and robust security measures.
Why AWS?
AWS and Amazon Personalize present a compelling fit for this scenario. AWS's scalable infrastructure ensures the solution can swiftly expand to accommodate the media company's increasing demands, offering seamless scalability as user engagement rises. Amazon Personalize, with its advanced machine learning capabilities, excels in delivering real-time personalized content to users, aligning perfectly with the media company's goal. Our proficiency in both serverless applications and Amazon Personalize gives us the confidence to architect and deliver this solution effectively.
Partner Solution
Our solution embraced a serverless approach to swiftly deliver a functional solution in line with our client's goal of validating personalization's business value. Utilizing fully managed AWS services such as Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Kinesis, we established a secure, highly available, pay-per-use model that automatically scales to handle any workload.
Data collection is the first step, integrated with the customer platform via API to aggregate data in S3. The data flows through API Gateway to Kinesis Data Streams and then to Kinesis Firehose, with native API Gateway integration via mapping templates.
Once sufficient data is collected, AWS Step Functions orchestrate initial training for Amazon Personalize. After setup, a Lambda function handles real-time updates for user recommendations.
Infrastructure is deployed using AWS CDK, ensuring consistency across environments. Data encryption is active in transit and at rest, and AWS WAF safeguards API Gateway with DDoS protection.
The observability is based on Amazon CloudWatch:
Logging for all services is centralized to CloudWatch Logs;
CloudWatch Dashboards provide up-to-date visibility of the service metrics;
AWS X-Ray is used for traces - bringing end-to-end traceability of requests in the solution.
To capture and debug failed Lambda function invocations - a dead-letter SQS queue is configured. As a part of our CI/CD pipeline, following the DevSecOps principles of fast feedback loops and shifting security left on the pipelines,
Amazon CodeGuru is used for code quality and security vulnerability scans
CloudFormation Guard Validator to ensure the infrastructure complies with predefined checks
Results and Benefits
With Amazon Personalize, we efficiently create and implement customized recommendations and extensive user segmentation. Leveraging the serverless model and entirely managed AWS services enables rapid delivery of functional solutions and business benefits. The serverless strategy minimizes maintenance efforts, reducing long-term operational burdens. This approach empowers our client with a secure, budget-conscious, auto-scalable, and available architecture.
About the Partner
At Several Clouds, we are passionate about the public cloud as well as the DevOps culture and practices. We assist in modernizing legacy systems and do cloud migrations to achieve more secure, adaptive, and cost-effective environments.
Our AWS architects all possess deep knowledge and extensive experience throughout the full cycle of building business cases, planning, architecting, implementation, and building playbooks and runbooks to help you with:
Cloud adoption and migrations
Cloud training and talent transformation
Build secure and compliant cloud environments
Implement the DevOps and DevSecOps practices
Big Data and Machine Learning
Serverless and Cloud-Native Development