Managing AWS instances in one tap @ SKaaS

Hi, Tech readers welcome to another tech article of SKaaS. At SKaaS we are building the “Next generation skills platform” for that a robust & tested solution is required. Development team at SkaaS follows the agile methodology to develop the skill enable platform. So, everyday we are evolving with our product and our requirement changes.

Maintaining the best industry practices helps us to grow & develop complex products. We have dozens of micro services to manage our tech stack. All of these micro services are being used for the SKaaS platform hosted at www.skaas.guru & some other internal products.

AWS is amazon trademark. Used for representational purpose.

So, It is very important for DevOps team to segregate the production & development environment. Our tech stack runs on AWS managed services which includes — S3, EC2 Instance, Lambda, DynamoDB, Cloudfront etc. As our product is growing our tech stack is expanding rapidly. Managing instances that run different micro services for production & development environment is getting cumbersome. To tackle that we have developed a solution to manage instances.

Our primary idea was to develop a solution which give us easy way to start & stop instances, automate instance start & stop process, give us some reminder about unused instances, track instance start & stop process and most importantly mapping instance IP to domain address.

The fastest & simplest way to start working on this was to create a serverless application which will manage the instance state & a front end solution for DevOps, Product Management team to take action according to the requirement.

Server-less concept with lambda function

Our python team members developed a Lambda function which automates instance start & stop process, again it also can be changed manually. But for front end solution we need micro services data i.e. Instance Status, Server IP/Domain, Co-related front end domains etc.

Our nodeJS team members developed the solution of notifying the instance status changes & reminder services for unused instances. By far all these serverless Lambda functions are connected through API gateway to talk with each other.

Technically we have almost everything to manage our instances. But having GUI will ease the way of doing work. As the title suggests we decided to have a front end solution which is accessible in our fingertip. Yes, you guessed it right!! A smartphone — An application from where we can see our micro services data, manage instance state, related front end urls and get notification for status changes, reminders etc.

Our react team members built the hybrid solution on top of react native. The application workflow has some server & local authentication method.

1. Local Authentication 2. Getting Instance Status 3. Internet Error Handling

From API gateway we are getting the instance data you can see in the above screenshots. Also our application actions are based on instance state which is very critical so handling error like no internet is quite important.

Instance State & Data. *Date used here are representational

We have separate tabs just because of not confusing with production & development environment. Both have similar UI. It shows instance data & we can take action from the dropdown panel.

But accidentally stopping any server is a big mistake. So, We have an option to alert our team members before taking any action. Remember instance take time to start & stop hence we are doing all these task asynchronously.

So, this is the brief introduction of our tech stack, how we manage, how we are developing products and most importantly we are evolving every day.

Till then stay happy & keep hustling!