AWS Case Study On Slack

Before we start On case study it is very important to understand first that What is AWS and Slack, what are they used for. So in this article their would be following topic covered:-

1. What is AWS? What are different services offered by AWS and their use in different fields.
2. What is slack ?
3. How slack using AWS and its services?

What is AWS?

Suppose someone having a system with very low configuration and they have a use case of using high configuration for their project or startup but they have not a huge funds to invest on. Also they just want to run for few amounts of hours and for this small time investing such a huge amount obviously no one gonna invest. So in this case one can use Cloud Computing as a services where they can choose the configuration of system according to their need and just have to only for that amount of time that they use the services(This is known as Pay-as-we-go model).

Their is lot of company who offer Cloud Computing as service one of the company is Amazon which offer Amazon Web Service(AWS) as cloud-computing as service to the world so that one can use according to their need.. Under AWS their is approx. more that 2500 product which have a different use case in different fields. Below is one image showing different products of AWS which can be used by users.Below is the image showing other company cannot even compete with AWS as of now.

Services Offered by AWS

AWS offers more than 2500 services as of now. Here is the image showing services offered by AWS

Amazon EC2 :- User can use EC2 as a service under AWS for getting different configuration of system such as RAM,CPU,Storage for their system(which is known as Instance here).

Amazon S3 :- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. 

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS):- It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need.

Amazon SageMaker:- Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. SageMaker removes the heavy lifting from each step of the machine learning process to make it easier to develop high quality models.

AWS IoT :- AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices - cars, light bulbs, sensor grids, and more - easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices.

AWS Ground Station :- Easily and cost-effectively command and control satellites. Downlink data to the AWS global infrastructure, where you can integrate with other AWS compute, storage, analytics, and machine learning services.

Amazon Kinesis services:- Collect, process, and analyze data streams in real time.

And many more....

What is slack?

Slack is a proprietary business communication platform developed by American software company Slack Technologies. Slack offers many IRC-style features, including persistent chat rooms (channels) organized by topic, private groups, and direct messaging.

Content, including files, conversations, and people, is all searchable within Slack. Users can add emoji buttons to their messages, on which other users can then click to express their reactions to messages.

Teams:- Slack teams allow communities, groups, or teams to join a "workspace" via a specific URL or invitation sent by a team admin or owner. Although Slack was developed for professional and organizational communication, it has been adopted as a community platform, replacing message boards or social media groups.

Messaging:-Public channels allow team members to communicate without the use of email or group SMS (texting). Public channels are open to everyone in the workspace.

Private channels allow for private conversation between smaller sub-groups. These private channels can be used to organize large teams.

Direct messages allow users to send private messages to specific users rather than a group of people. Direct messages can include up to nine people. Once started, a direct message group can be converted into a private channel. Below is the interface of slack.

How slack using AWS and its services?

Challenge faced by Slack:- By June 2015 less than 18 months of its launch the company had more than 1.1 million daily users, 300,000 paid seats, and more than 30 million messages flowing through Slack each week via integrations with other services.

If Slack was to succeed in a fiercely competitive business-software marketplace, its founders knew they would need a lean staff, low costs, and above all an IT environment capable of supporting speed, agility, and innovation. Going to the cloud was the logical choice.

“The realities of physical space, hardware acquisition, replacement parts, running a server facility with all its costs—all the physical manifestations that can lead to breakages—made a traditional IT environment impractical for an Internet startup,” says Richard Crowley, Slack’s director of operations. “Plus we would have needed an extra layer of expertise just to run the infrastructure. We could have operated with that kind of IT infrastructure, but the cost and complexity would have made it much harder to launch the business.”

Why Amazon Web Service?

Slack has a relatively simple IT architecture that is based on a broad range of AWS services, including i2.xlarge Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for basic compute tasks; Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for users’ file uploads and static assets; and Elastic Load Balancing to balance workloads across Amazon EC2 instances. Slack uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for nightly backups of MySQL instances running on Amazon EC2 i2s instances; the Amazon EBS volumes are attached to the instances and used as temporary storage before being sent to Amazon S3. Slack replaced hundreds of terabytes of Amazon EBS gp2 volumes with lower-cost Amazon EBS sc1 volumes for database backups. Since the switch, the company continues to grow the data on its user base.

For security, Slack uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to control security groups and firewall rules and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control user credentials and roles. The company uses Amazon CloudTrail for monitoring logs related to Amazon EC2 instances, and Amazon Route 53 for DNS management.

Along with the AWS services, Slack is using the Redis data structure server, the Apache Solr search tool, the Squid caching proxy, and a MySQL database.

The Benefits:- Using AWS as its IT infrastructure has helped Slack achieve an astonishing growth rate and a multibillion-dollar valuation with a platform that supports speed of innovation and responsiveness, reliability, and security features to ensure the confidentiality of customer information.

Literally says AWS gives fast-growing companies like Slack the ability to minimize their involvement with daily IT management. That lets them focus on pushing innovative products and services to market quickly. “We have a lot of metrics and programs that tell us about available capacity for new customer teams to join and existing customers to grow their Slack usage,” he says. “With traditional IT, it would take weeks or months to contend with hardware lead times to add more capacity. Using AWS, we can look at user metrics weekly or daily and react with new capacity in 30 seconds.”

A large part of the appeal of Slack is that it replaces disparate communications tools with a single, unified platform. But that puts an increased burden on Slack to ensure that its customers' information is safe, and that Slack can deliver the kind of enterprise reliability and high availability to support the service-level agreements expected of robust enterprise applications.

“As a company, our business is integral to our customers’ daily lives,” Crowley says. “So in our customers’ eyes, our security controls and ability to deliver a reliable service become incredibly important, and it’s a responsibility we take incredibly seriously.”

The ease of provisioning resources in the AWS cloud allows Slack to practice disaster recovery scenarios, which is essential for assuring existing and prospective customers that their information will always be there, when and where they need it. “One of the real strengths of AWS is that we can do a lot of re-provisioning of our infrastructure, making sure that we can recover quickly and competently in the event that something goes down,” Crowley says. “Having the ability to quickly grab twice as many of a certain class of instances is great. It gives us the ability to regularly practice our disaster-recovery scenarios.” Slack is also saving money with the lower-cost Amazon EBS sc1 volumes, providing the requisite speed at approximately one-fourth the cost. And, with the Amazon EBS sc1 volumes, the price is so low that Slack can leave them running continuously without having to build and operate special volume management tooling.

AWS services used by Slack:-

1. Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics. Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9's) of durability, and stores data for millions of applications for companies all around the world.

How it works - S3 access points

2. Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.

It has a variety of computing component(RAM & CPU) from small range ( 1 CPU, 1 RAM ) to ( 128 CPU, 3904 RAM) which is really a big resources to use. Below is the image for showing some range of components

3. Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones. Elastic Load Balancing offers three types of load balancers that all feature the high availability, automatic scaling, and robust security necessary to make your applications fault tolerant.

Three types of Load Balancer available in Elastic Load Balancer:-

a. Application Load Balancer

b. Network Load Balancer

c. Classic Load Balancer

Here is the image of how load balancer work

4. Amazon Elastic Book Store (EBS)

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is an easy to use, high performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for both throughput and transaction intensive workloads at any scale. A broad range of workloads, such as relational and non-relational databases, enterprise applications, containerized applications, big data analytics engines, file systems, and media workflows are widely deployed on Amazon EBS.

You can choose from five different volume types to balance optimal price and performance. You can achieve single digit-millisecond latency for high performance database workloads such as SAP HANA or gigabyte per second throughput for large, sequential workloads such as Hadoop. You can change volume types, tune performance, or increase volume size without disrupting your critical applications, so you have cost-effective storage when you need it.

Conclusion

Since now days we all are moving towards digitalization due to this pandemic COVID one can use AWS service for their startup and projects. Because it gives a lot of facility and security too and we have to just pay for only that amount of part that we gonna use services. There is also a free tier facility in AWS by which one can use AWS to learn without paying but it has certain limitation.

Now days a lot of big company running their business on AWS and very efficiently. Also a lot of new startup get succeeded due to AWS which was really not possible to even start the projects.

Connect me on LinkedIn

Thanks for your giving a read to my Blog hope This Blog helps you to grow some knowledge about AWS and Its use case..