Introduction:

Our company partnered with a leading real estate company in India, renowned for its extensive online presence and robust customer base. They leverage blockchain technology to ensure secure and transparent property transactions, both for land and flats. Additionally, they have a microservices architecture need to manage their high-traffic online real estate platform. This case study outlines how our company proposed a cost optimization strategy leveraging open-source tools instead of native AWS services, resulting in a 15% reduction in infrastructure costs while maintaining performance and security.

 Challenges:

 The real estate company faced several infrastructural challenges:

• High Costs: Their existing infrastructure incurred significant costs around ($900k-1000K per month), hindering scalability and future growth.
• Scalability Concerns: The existing infrastructure struggled to handle peak traffic loads associated with online property sales.
• Bulky infra: The client’s heavy reliance on, particularly EC2 instances, resulted in limited flexibility and high operational costs.
• Optimized Microservices Implementation: To keep pace with market demands and expanding clientele, transitioning to microservices was essential for agility and scalability.
• Blockchain Cost Optimization: Optimizing the existing AWS blockchain integration for cost-efficiency without compromising security was crucial.

Timelines:
 
Our experienced team understood their vast and complex infrastructure in order to tailor the services and strategies to be applied on their infrastructure.

• Understanding the Hybrid Infra: 10-15 days (about 2 weeks)
• Cloud Deployments: 2 months
• Cost Optimization: 2 months
  

The Solution:

 Deployment of AWS services and complementing it with cost optimizations while keeping security in check.

Blockchain Integration Optimization:

• Leveraging Serverless Options for Cost Reduction:

A conventional approach often involves running dedicated blockchain nodes within AMB 24/7, incurring ongoing costs. We skillfully analyzed blockchain usage patterns and identified opportunities for serverless options like AMB Access Serverless. This approach utilizes serverless functions that activate only when needed, triggered by events like API requests or scheduled tasks. This eliminates the constant cost of dedicated nodes, leading to significant cost savings.

• Technical Details:

• Integration with AWS Lambda: We integrated AMB Access Serverless with Lambda, a serverless compute
• Custom Lambda Functions: We developed custom functions to handle specific blockchain interaction needs.
• Trigger Configuration: These functions were triggered only when necessary, ensuring optimal resource allocation.
  
  

• Optimizing Blockchain Data Storage:

Blockchain ledgers accumulated vast amounts of data over time, impacting storage costs. We implemented lifecycle policies within AMB to manage data storage efficiently. These policies automatically transfer less frequently accessed data, like records of past transactions, to lower-cost storage tiers like Amazon S3 Glacier.

• Maintaining Security Throughout Optimization:

Security is paramount with blockchain technology, especially for sensitive property transaction data. Throughout the optimization process, we prioritized existing security measures. This included access control mechanisms, data encryption (both at rest and in transit), and network security best practices.

• Technical Details:
• Granular Access Controls: We ensured only authorized personnel had access, leveraging IAM roles and policies within AMB.
• Data Encryption: We verified data encryption remained in place for both on-chain and off-chain data.
• Security Audits: We conducted regular security audits to identify and address any potential vulnerabilities.

The above Blockchain service optimizations saved cost of around $30-40K/month alone.

Microservices Deployment and Optimization:

• We conducted a thorough analysis of their existing monolithic applications to identify potential candidates for decomposition into microservices.
• We used AWS managed Kubernetes service, EKS for automated deployment, scaling, and management of containerized microservices on AWS.
• After successful analysis deployment of EKS was to be done on 3 various env (dev, uat, prod) with 4 EKS clusters, 150+ worker nodes and 800+ pods running 35+ microservices in them.
• Instead of manually right sizing the worker nodes, Intelligent Cluster Autoscalers like Karpenter was integrated with EKS to dynamically scale worker nodes based on real-time traffic, ensuring optimal resource utilization and avoid over-provisioning.
• Moving to microservices architecture saved most of the EC2 costs around $50-60K per month

Open-Source CI/CD Pipeline Integration:

• We replaced the existing, expensive, native AWS CI/CD tools with Jenkins, a popular open-source CI/CD server.
• Jenkins seamlessly integrated with their existing AWS environment and microservices architecture, facilitating automated code building, testing, and deployment.
• This transition offered significant cost saving around $25-30K per month while maintaining a robust and customizable CI/CD pipeline.

Outcome:

• Cost Reduction: By implementing the above strategies, we achieved cost savings of up to 15% (100K-135K per month) of the total monthly cost.
• Enhanced Scalability: The microservices architecture with containerization and Kubernetes ensured seamless scaling to handle traffic fluctuations.
• Improved Performance: Optimized resource allocation, containerization, and open-source monitoring tools led to faster response times and a more reliable platform.
• Increased Agility: The open-source CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins facilitated faster development cycles and simplified deployments.
• Maintained Security: We ensured the security of the blockchain integration and overall infrastructure throughout the optimization process.
• Blockchain Efficiency: We optimized the blockchain integration for cost-effectiveness without compromising security, leading to further cost savings.
  
  

Conclusion:
 
Our expertise in cloud optimization, microservices architecture, open-source tools, and blockchain integration empowered this real estate giant to achieve significant cost savings and the cost came down to $800-900K per month, improved scalability, and enhanced agility.

By leveraging open-source solutions alongside the power of AWS and optimizing their existing blockchain implementation, we transformed our client’s infrastructure, positioning them for continued growth and success in the competitive Indian real estate market.