Migrated Dhiway’s consumer application (Mark Studio) to AWS from Azure.

Dhiway

The Client

Dhiway is set up to deliver provenance based verifiable data streams between participants in any transaction over digital networks. To do so the company has designed a systems architecture comprising of a data exchange protocol, APIs and SDKs for a distributed ledger system.

 

Business Need

The overarching goal has been to optimise operational costs on a cloud-based infrastructure while being able to deliver the services at the scale determined by business strategy.

The AWS based approach was opted in order to determine the extent of changes required as well as being able test specific workload combinations for contrast with the existing infrastructure based on the Azure cloud.

 

The Solution

To address the scope of this engagement and design for the agreed upon objectives of this test bed Stovl built a highly scalable design while selecting the cost optimized infrastructure resources. The solution included the following key AWS services:

  • Elastic Compute (EC2)
  • Elastic Block Store (EBS)
  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
  • Systems Manager’s Parameter Store
  • Systems Manager’s Secrets Manager
  • Application Load balancer (ALB)
  • CloudWatch

The blockchain has been deployed as docker containers inside the EC2 instances. Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes have been configured to provide performance optimized storage for the containers. AWS CloudWatch agent was used to collect custom metrics from the Blockchain nodes; using these metrics Stovl was able to precisely identify the resources consumed, which helped to determine the per transaction cost.

A detailed proof-of-concept on AWS was conducted based on the reference architecture, to help Dhiway realize the key values of AWS services and its benefits. Stovl also provided continued technical support to Dhiway during migration of their container based blockchain workloads from Azure to AWS as part of the test bench.

The security profile of the blockchain based applications needs special focus in terms of best practices. Stovl have carefully designed Dhiway’s VPCs, subnets and NAT gateways to ensure all the transactions are secure. Stovl have used AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) for providing secure access to the service endpoints/APIs. In addition to that Stovl also used AWS services like IAM policies, Systems Manager’s Parameter store, Secrets Manager in the solution to improve the overall security standards of the deployed instance.

Stovl have also helped Dhiway to consume the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK) inside their NodeJS application for programmatic access of the secrets stored in the AWS Secrets Manager.

The final solution included AWS resources and services to comply with all the pillars defined in the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

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