Migrating from Azure to AWS to Take Advantage of Reliability and Clear Pricing

Executive Summary

Today’s best digital marketers don’t just blindly purchase online advertising placements, hoping someone might become a customer. Digital marketing has made highly personalized and targeted advertising a necessary reality, drawing on comprehensive analytics and data to understand a customer’s behavior, interests, and preferences. Equipped with these insights, companies can reach customers who have already expressed an interest in or a need for a particular solution, so they are able to suggest the right products at the right time. This results in fundamentally better marketing, making advertising a more relevant, useful, and personalized endeavor hand-tailored to meet the demands of any customer.

Track Revenue, a performance marketing software company, helps marketers connect with customers through its sophisticated analytics platform and machine learning. Media buyers and advertising networks equipped with Track Revenue can manage, analyze, and optimize media campaigns using data analytics and machine learning to account for billions of real-time events. Giving users full control over marketing campaigns and other marketing needs, Track Revenue’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform allows top-flight performance marketers to gain valuable insights about their customers and fully maximize their advertising campaigns. Placed in a single, centralized platform, Track Revenue makes it easy for digital marketers to organize, monitor, and execute digital marketing campaigns using one powerful and comprehensive solution.

The Challenges

Track Revenue’s SaaS infrastructure was previously split between two different platforms: Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. While 75% of Track Revenue’s infrastructure needs were already being met by AWS, the remaining 25% of data operations relied on Azure’s Machine Learning and Deployment servers. But with time, challenges concerning the Azure platform became a difficult and expensive problem, resulting in unexpected downtime and poor pricing options.

For some time, Track Revenue was looking to migrate its entire operations into AWS, but the significant scale of the project gave the company pause. But upon reconsidering its infrastructure needs, Track Revenue determined its best course of action would be to migrate its data and applications away from Azure into AWS. While Track Revenue was already familiar with the benefits offered by AWS, the company was excited to take advantage of the large technological strides the platform had made, making it possible to incorporate new features that would help their solution stay competitive in the marketplace.

The ClearScale Solution

Diagram

The company approached ClearScale, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, to collaborate with architecture design, development, deployment, and migration. After determining Track Revenue’s needs and requirements, ClearScale’s primary task was to build a low latency data pipeline using AWS tools.

ClearScale and Track Revenue sought out AWS for this solution because of the platform’s high scalability and cost efficiency, making the pipeline both lean and affordable. This unique data pipeline would serve as one of the most important aspects of Track Revenue’s infrastructure, collecting thousands of records a second from multiple regions, and storing both raw data and rolled up data, which enabled the company to manipulate individual records as quickly as possible.

ClearScale developed unique solutions to address each of Track Revenue’s specific requirements. First, to address Track Revenue’s record collection needs, ClearScale built a Kinesis pipeline consisting of multiple Kinesis streams in different regions. The pipeline consisted of master and slave regions, where slave regions would collect data and use Lambda to forward all requests to the master region.

Next, for raw data storage and rolled up data, ClearScale selected two subscribers for the Kinesis Stream: first, a Lambda function to check for errors and insert raw data, and second, Kinesis Data Analytics to roll up data and insert it through Lambda. Finally, to quickly manipulate individual records, ClearScale chose to store raw data in DynamoDB, allowing for instant access to any record. For rolled up data, ClearScale employed Aurora, allowing for quick access to necessary relational data.

The Benefits

Track Revenue is now able to take advantage of a data infrastructure that’s fully hosted on AWS, making the most of the platform’s latest cutting-edge technologies. Kinesis, Aurora, and DynamoDB give Track Revenue a highly scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure that’s reduced the need for additional front-end management. DynamoDB also allows for all raw data to be pruned after a certain age, reducing the costs of data storage while retaining the necessary information contained within.

Thanks to its new, fully AWS-powered low latency data pipeline, insights can be gathered and delivered instantaneously, enhancing the speed and reliability of the Track Revenue platform for digital marketers to take advantage of.

And after facing costly issues of downtime and the confusing pricing schemes of Azure, Track Revenue is now able to enjoy the reliability and clear costs offered by the AWS platform. Eliminating the downtime risk posed by Azure means Track Revenue’s users can depend on a stable platform with high availability, ensuring access to real-time data across the globe at a moment’s notice.

In digital marketing, delivering the right message at the perfect time is crucial for success. With the enhanced speed and reliability offered through the AWS infrastructure, Track Revenue can continue developing digital marketing solutions with greater accuracy and accessibility.