Arrow brings ArrowSphere to AWS
ArrowSphere Billing Engine code was refactored and migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) using serverless technology and shows cost reduction and increased performance.
Arrow is helping partners around the globe to succeed in their digital transformation and to accelerate their cloud growth by empowering service providers and value-added resellers to monetise and manage the entire lifecycle of digital services delivery.
ArrowSphere is a multi-tier cloud brokerage platform, engineered to simplify the connection between cloud service providers, partners and end-customers.
The platform offers to partners a one-stop shop solution to help them meet their customer’s needs by providing a single platform to purchase and manage cloud products and services (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS), monitor activity and consumption with embedded business intelligence tools, sell own services with customisable storefront, and simplify billing process. Everything easily integrated with existing systems via secure API sets.
The Challenge
The ArrowSphere Billing Engine is responsible for creating the invoices based on customers consumption of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS technologies of various vendors, which can include custom mark-ups and discounts so the customers can charge their own end-customer properly. Since invoicing is done monthly or yearly, the workload demand spikes when close to the end of the month and year.
Another infrastructure demanding feature available in the platform is the cloud consumption analytics that presents dashboards to users based on actual and forecasted consumption of the vendors’ cloud services against defined budget. This creates workload demand that is difficult to predict.
When launched in 2012, the ArrowSphere Billing Engine was deployed in infrastructure hosted on-premises, however the company expected the platform to go global and to have exponential growth in the coming years. This would reflect into millions of billing lines to be computed in short time frames in a near future. To tackle this challenge, the ArrowSphere Billing Engine needed elasticity, scalability, performance and stability while still keeping the costs low.
The Solution
Arrow Cloud team holds more than 50 AWS technical certifications, and using this highly technical expertise, the architecture team came up with a powerful but complex serverless design that would address all requirements but would also need extent code refactoring. This architecture was based on an ecosystem of AWS native services, which mainly consisted of serverless computing power (AWS Lambda) processing data coming from cloud vendors systems (AWS API gateway), then cataloguing the results in a distributed and fault tolerant database (AWS Aurora).
Based on that serverless design, the Arrow certified developers and engineers worked on refactoring the code and, in one month, have successfully put the platform into production serving customer throughout the globe.
The Result
“Due to the volume of data we were ingesting, we had stability concerns. Now, AWS has proven that, if used right, the cloud potential is limitless”
Miguel Real, Global ArrowSphere Project Manager
Once the platform was live in AWS, the team assessed the costs to be reduced to 30% while the performance increasing 10 times, when compared to the on-premises deployment.
Today, in 2019, the platform is available in more than 25 countries and serves over 10,000 customers and the number of transactions is expected to grow at a yearly rate higher than 90% for the coming years. ArrowSphere Billing Engine has shown the capability to support the increasing workload demand throughout the globe and its team is confident on the platform stability and believe that its potential is limitless.
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Useful Resources:
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