All posts by Sushanth Mangalore

QsrSoft launches Digital Huddle Board in 3 months with AWS serverless and Fire devices

Post Syndicated from Sushanth Mangalore original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/qsrsoft-launches-digital-huddle-board-in-3-months-with-aws-serverless-and-fire-devices/

QsrSoft is a software as a service (SaaS) company that develops solutions for clients in the restaurant, hospitality, and retail industries to help them achieve operational excellence. QsrSoft has provided these services for more than two decades and now services over 14,000 locations. QsrSoft started using AWS in 2015 and fully migrated all their workloads to AWS by 2016. QsrSoft can innovate rapidly with AWS and use best-in class technologies for cloud-native solutions for their customers.

In QsrSoft’s target industries, it is important to have a way to focus and motivate employees on common objectives. It can be hard to stay on top of ongoing activities and inspire a team towards operational goals. Through client engagement and data collection, QsrSoft identified this as a pressing business challenge that could be solved with technology. After attending an AWS Digital Innovation Program workshop, QsrSoft conceptualized a digital huddle board that connects teams through gamification, communication, recognition, and excellence in shift management. To bring QsrSoft TV to market in the shortest possible time, QsrSoft decided to build using the AWS serverless suite of services.

QsrSoft successfully lowered the barrier of entry when installing a digital huddle board. Using commodity hardware from Amazon devices such as Fire TV Sticks and Fire Smart TVs, QsrSoft released the product as an app in the Amazon App store. Clients can use existing TV screens when rolling out QsrSoft TV, and only have to plug in a Fire TV Stick and pair it with a five-digit code. This blog post describes QsrSoft TV’s architecture and the AWS services employed in building it.

QsrSoft TV architecture

Building on top of their existing microservices architecture and AWS Amplify, a team of three developers brought QsrSoft TV to market in three months. The solution relies heavily on serverless technologies on AWS. Traditionally, in developing a new product, QsrSoft would need to engage several specialized technical resources. Using the fully managed experience of serverless technologies, QsrSoft can focus on delivering business value for the use case. AWS takes care of managing the technology’s hosting and implementation. With serverless, you only pay for what you use, which makes it possible to correlate your costs with the success of your solution.

Figure 1 illustrates the architecture of this solution:

Figure 1. Architecture diagram of QsrSoft TV solution

Figure 1. Architecture diagram of QsrSoft TV solution

Digital huddle board app

The customer-facing component of the solution is the application, which runs on Fire devices in restaurants. AWS Amplify is a service that streamlines development of both web applications and native apps. The app is derived from a single-page application (SPA) developed with Vue.js. AWS Amplify provides features such as integrated authentication, CI/CD, and Web Preview. It also provides GraphQL-based endpoints to access Amazon DynamoDB using AWS AppSync. This enables the QsrSoft development team to function autonomously without dependency on the operations or data integration teams. You can connect to the different Amplify backends from the AWS Management Console or with command line interface (CLI) commands. With the Amplify CLI, you can use default categories for the backends or use the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) to customize them.

GraphQL based API layer

The heart of QsrSoft TV is the API that provides the application with its core functionality. QsrSoft built an AWS AppSync endpoint to power QsrSoft TV’s business logic. AWS Amplify provides an easy way to create a secure AWS AppSync API endpoint through integrated authentication and transport layer security (TLS) for in-transit encryption. The development team can first model the data visually in Amplify Studio. Amplify then creates the queries, subscriptions, and mutations. With a single click from the Studio, you can deploy this model to an AWS AppSync API endpoint. The use of annotations permitted the dev team to customize the model further for the application’s needs, such as indexing by key attributes, authorization, and model relationships. This feature of Amplify Studio saved the development team up to 50% of the total API development effort.

Continuous automated deployments and releases

AWS Amplify abstracts the need for a dedicated operations team. This is enabled by AWS Amplify’s fully managed deployment and hosting for full-stack web applications. The development team connected Amplify to the GitHub repository, and in minutes had a complete CI/CD pipeline in place. There was no need to configure any pipelines or handcraft any YAML files. QsrSoft uses Amplify Web Previews, which enabled the product team and beta testers to preview multiple changes and experiments without releasing code to production. While Amplify deployed the Vue.js application, QsrSoft used fastlane to automate the deployment of the Fire TV application into the Amazon App Store. fastlane is an open-source tool that automates tasks like code signing and releasing the Fire TV binary to the Amazon App Store. This enabled QsrSoft to stay true to its automated deployments and infrastructure as code (IaC) practices.

Simplified password-less authentication

With this command line statement, amplify add auth, QsrSoft laid the groundwork for securing their TV application. Behind the scenes, Amplify uses Amazon Cognito to set up a user pool for the app users. QsrSoft TV provides a password-less login experience to the users, by abstracting the need to log in using a username and password. Instead, you use a five-digit code to pair the Fire TV app with a specific location. Amazon Cognito enables this by securing the app with JSON web tokens (JWT).

Automatic data synchronization

The development team focused on data modeling using the visual tools built into Amplify Studio. Amplify provided an AWS AppSync endpoint, so the developers could use GraphQL to interact with Amplify DataStore. Since the data models in the Amplify Studio support DataStore, the development team can now support an app that works offline. Offline mode is vital to any enterprise application, and it engages QsrSoft TV’s users even during an internet outage. Amplify is used to create an AWS AppSync backend with Amazon DynamoDB tables that match the schema created at the application. As the app interacts with the local DataStore, it starts an instance of its Sync Engine, which publishes the data changes by the application to the DynamoDB backend. An additional AWS Lambda-based backend called QORM, aggregates information from QsrSoft’s custom data warehouse implementation based on Amazon S3 and Amazon Aurora.

The scaling and performance provided by DynamoDB and Lambda allowed QsrSoft to scale without extensive planning, as the number of installs increased. This fully serverless application stack is cost-effective and enables QsrSoft to innovate freely. QsrSoft TV onboarded 100 locations in the first week. QsrSoft projects 7,000+ installs in the first year.

Conclusion

AWS is constantly innovating on behalf of our customers like QsrSoft. By leveraging serverless technologies on AWS, QsrSoft accelerated the go-to-market time for QsrSoft TV. Serverless on AWS provides a low barrier to entry for innovation-focused organizations who want to bring an idea to life quickly to provide business value to their customers.

Amazon Fire devices enable software vendors to make their applications available for large-scale distribution. Fire devices are today being used by several thousand households and workplaces worldwide. Many industries can benefit from developing apps for Amazon Fire devices that can be used on large displays and television screens.

Further reading:

Mergers and Acquisitions readiness with the Well-Architected Framework

Post Syndicated from Sushanth Mangalore original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/mergers-and-acquisitions-readiness-with-the-well-architected-framework/

Introduction

Companies looking for an acquisition or a successful exit through a merger, undergo a technical assessment as part of the due diligence process. While being a profitable business by itself can attract interest, running a disciplined IT department within your organization can make the acquisition more valuable. As an entity operating cloud workloads on AWS, you can use the AWS Well-Architected Framework. This will demonstrate that your workloads are architected with industry best practices in mind. The Well-Architected Framework explains the pros and cons of decisions you make while building systems on AWS. It consistently measures architectures against best practices observed in customer workloads across several industries. These workloads have achieved continued success on AWS through architectures that are secure, high-performing, resilient, scalable, and efficient. The Well-Architected Framework evaluates your cloud workloads based on five pillars:

  • Operational Excellence: The ability to support development and run workloads effectively, gain insights into your operations, and continuously improve supporting processes and procedures to deliver business value.
  • Security: The ability to protect data, systems, and assets to take advantage of cloud technologies to improve your security.
  • Reliability: The ability of the workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently. This includes the ability to operate and test the workload through its complete lifecycle.
  • Performance Efficiency: The ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
  • Cost Optimization: The ability to run cost-aware workloads that achieve business outcomes while minimizing costs.

The Well-Architected Framework Value Proposition in Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A)

Continuously assess the pre-M&A state of cloud workloads – The Well-Architected state for a workload must be treated as a moving target. New cloud patterns and best practices emerge every day. The Well-Architected Framework constantly evolves to incorporate them. Your workloads can continuously grow, shrink, become more complex, or simpler. Mergers and acquisitions can be a long, drawn-out process, which can take can take months to complete. Well-Architected reviews are recommended for workloads every 6 months to 1 year, or with every major development milestone. This helps guard against IT inertia and allows emerging best practices to be accounted for in your continuously evolving workload architecture. The technical currency can be maintained throughout the M&A process by continuously assessing your workloads against the Well-Architected Framework. The accompanying AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool) helps you track milestones as you make improvements to and measure your progress.

Well-Architected Continuous Improvement Cycle

Standardize through a common framework – One of the biggest challenges in M&As is the standardization of the Enterprise IT post-merger. The IT departments of organizations can operate differently, and have vastly different IT assets, skill sets, and processes. According to a McKinsey article on the Strategic Value of IT in M&A, more than half the synergies available in a merger are related to IT. If the acquirer is also an AWS customer, this can enable the significant synergies in M&As. The Well-Architected Framework can be a foundation on which the two IT departments can find common ground. Even if the acquirer does not have a cloud-based environment like AWS, inheriting a Well-Architected AWS setup can help the post-merger IT landscape evolve.

Integrate seamlessly through Well-Architected landing zones – AWS Control Tower service or AWS Landing Zone solution are options that can provision Well-Architected multi-account AWS environments. Together with AWS Organizations, this makes the IT integration a lot smoother for the AWS environments across enterprises. AWS accounts can detach from one AWS Organization and attach to another seamlessly. The latter can enroll with an existing Control Tower setup to benefit from the security and governance guardrails. In a Well-Architected landing zone, your management account will not have any workloads. As shown in the following diagram, you may move member accounts from your AWS Organization to your acquirer’s AWS Organization under the right Organizational Unit (OU). You can later decommission your AWS Organization and close your management AWS account.

Sample pre-merger AWS environments

Sample post-merger AWS environment

Benefit from faster migration to AWS – using the Well-Architected Framework, you can achieve faster migration to AWS. Workload risks can be mitigated beforehand by using best practices from AWS before the migration. Post migration, the workloads benefit from AWS offerings that already have many of the Well-Architected best practices built into them. The improvement plans from the Well-Architected tool include the recommended AWS services that can address identified risks. Physical IT assets are heavily depreciated during an acquisition and do not fetch valuations close to their original purchase price. AWS workloads that are Well-Architected should be evaluated by the actual business value they provide. By consolidating your IT needs on AWS, you are also decreasing the overhead of vendor consolidation for the acquirer. This can be challenging when multiple active contracts must transfer hands.

Overcome the innovation barrier – At the onset of an M&A, companies may be focusing too much on keeping the lights on through the process. Businesses that do not move forward may fall behind on continuous innovation. Not only can innovation open more business opportunities, but it can also influence the acquisition valuation. Well-Architected reviews can optimize costs. This can result in diverse benefits such as better agility and an increased use of advanced technologies. This can facilitate rapid innovation. Improvements gained in the security posture, reliability, and performance of the workload make it more valuable to the acquirer.

Demonstrate depth in your area of expertise – Well-Architected lenses help evaluate workloads for specific technology or business domains. Lenses dive deeper into the domain-specific best practices for the workload. If your business specializes in a domain for which a Well-Architected lens is available, doing a review with the specific lens will provide more value for your workload. Today, AWS has lenses for serverless, SaaS, High Performance Computing (HPC), the financial services industry, machine learning, IoT workloads and more. We recently announced a new Management and Governance Lens.

Build workloads using AWS vetted constructs – AWS Solutions Library provides you a repository of Well-Architected solutions across a range of technologies and industry verticals. The library includes reference architectures, implementations of reusable patterns, and fully baked end-to-end solution implementations. Use these building blocks to assemble your workloads. Include the AWS recommended best practices into them, and create an attractive proposition to an acquirer.

Conclusion

You can start taking advantage of the Well-Architected Framework today to improve your technical readiness for an acquisition. The Well-Architected Tool in the AWS Management Console allows you to review your workload at no cost. Engage with your AWS account team early, and we can provide the right guidance for your specific M&A, and plan your Well-Architected technical readiness. Using the Well-Architected Framework as the cornerstone, the AWS Solutions Architects and APN partners have guided thousands of customers through this journey. We are looking forward to helping you succeed.