LiberCloud offers content management and collaboration services for content authors, educators, instructors as well as active learners. The SaaS platform allows individuals to sign-up as well as it gives the ability to educational institutions and businesses to create dedicated instances and private communities for sharing or collaborating on content. The multi-tenant SaaS platform initially developed on the LAMP stack, was being expanded with a MongoDB NoSQL cluster, Node.js component and Socket.io for asynchronous notifications, and an Ejabberd based real-time XMPP server for group discussion rooms and live-chat. The content management services support multi-media assets as well as interactive assets such as virtual whiteboards, real-time polls and surveys, and assessments. LiberCloud launched its beta services to the public in 2014 and announced the general availability at the international Bett trade-show in London in January 2015. LiberCloud service was targeting international businesses or startups with a distributed workforce, clients, and user base. Therefore, it required designing and deploying the services in a distributed fashion, such that content originated in one region is available in others, and participants in real-time virtual discussions, polls, and group chats could be in any region. LiberCloud intent to offer its services near or in the proximity of the organizations and users we serve required a distributed architecture spread across multiple geographical regions. The inability to do this more efficiently and the flexibility to be able to expand and grow the infrastructure dynamically triggered the decision to move our services to AWS. In December 2015, we finalized the migration of LiberCloud infrastructure from Rackspace to Amazon Web Services (AWS), a process that took four months from start to finish, as we had to re-implement some of the components to take advantage of the new distributed S3 storage service. AWS flexibility, the programmable shared cloud storage S3, and the plethora of services available on AWS drove the decision. Being a small startup, we feared that the lack of personalized support, similar to what Rackspace gave us, was a risk, but AWS flexibility and tools available to create fault-tolerant services on a relatively small budget balanced that risk. Since our move to AWS we suffered not a single downtime event because of the multi-region SaaS infrastructure we created, even if there had been regional disruptions in AWS services. We gained the ability to grow more dynamically, plus the comprehensive management console, and the detailed usage reports allowed us to monitor our costs and budget our expenses more accurately. This document provides an overview of the new SaaS infrastructure, its scalability, and security when we finalized the move in December 2015. As the acting CTO for LiberCloud, I authored this document to share with prospects, customers, and investors, providing details on the architecture's scalability. Comments are closed.
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