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As delivered to Princeton Web Systems, almost none of the legacy system functioned as required. The client could neither add advanced functionality to support the business expansion plans, nor offer the services enabled by the system's basic functionality of expected quality. Thus, the system had to be both completely redesigned and significantly expanded to meet the customer's growing expectations.

The system also needed to be highly scalable to support the project's gradual, but significant future expansion. The peak load on the website varied significantly, especially during the periods when the client launched major advertising campaigns. Cloud computing allowed the development team to better resolve this and other important issues during the application redesign while providing significant cost savings.

For the system implementation, third party integration and QA Princeton Web Systems used and efficiently managed distributed teams in several locations. Finally, SQS service was required for dataflow processing, which made Amazon EC2 cloud-computing technology a natural choice for project implementation.

Solution

Princeton Web Systems proposed to use Amazon's cloud-computing technology. This approach reduced the client's technology expenses several-fold.

Princeton Web Systems redesigned and expanded the system to include a user-friendly Ajax GUI. The application's processing power was enhanced, and the number of concurrent users it can support has increased several-fold. The added API enables the system's integration with multiple external systems, such as Facebook, Parade.com, Inboxdollars.com, Cashcrate, and others.

The main challenge posed by the project was incorporating the newly developed client widget and backend into the legacy system where this part of the functionality was implemented using JSF. The project team included two software development engineers and one QA engineer. We delivered a powerful solution that has been successfully used by the customer to extend their services to a growing number of U.S. clients. The solution's easy and cost-effective scalability has recently been proven when the customer decided to expand their market beyond the U.S.

Technology Solution

The solution was developed using Amazon EC2. Amazon SQS was used to provide the asynchronous data exchange between the different components of the system. The project was assembled and deployed using the Rightscale cloud management system. Continuous integration was ensured using Atlassian Bamboo.

 

Result

The customer has received a powerful tool that fully supports their unique advertising services. Since the launch of the new portal, the company's customer base has rapidly grown and the system has been recently scaled up to support the client's overseas expansion plans.

Enterprise-level document migration and consolidation system Princeton Web Systems helped a customer to introduce an enterprise-level document migration and consolidation system based on the Windows Azure platform to reduce migration costs for the users. Princeton Web Systems' customer is a provider of solutions for document migration and consolidation between enterprise-level storage systems. Document storage migration and consolidation systems of this type operate using data amounts ranging from gigabytes to terabytes, and transferring the data and its processing can be very time-consuming. Normally, it is not recommended or even possible to stop the system while the migration is in progress. Since the intermediate data storage during the migration process may require significant infrastructure only while the migration is in progress, Princeton Web Systems proposed a Windows Azure solution to reduce migration costs. The intermediate storage computing infrastructure is rented using Windows Azure BLOB Storage, and this infrastructure is paid for only when it is actually used.

The additional software infrastructure required for the migration and consolidation process consists of:

• A set of connectors that transfer data from a source system(s) to a cloud
• Those connectors that transfer the converted data from the cloud to a destination repository
• A data conversion application in the cloud storage

In addition to being directly responsible for the circulation of documents between the systems, the connectors also synchronize the modified data. Application for previewing and quick access to Microsoft SharePoint-based documents Princeton Web Systems helped minimize a customer's computing resources with the Windows Azure-based external service.

Princeton Web Systems' customer is a provider of Microsoft SharePoint 2010-based solutions for storage and retrieval of enterprise-level documents. One of the requirements for the system's functionality was to allow for quick previewing of relevant pages in a located document without downloading the whole document from a server. This capability is especially important for accessing search results when the user needs to locate a document within a retrieved batch of documents, as it saves significant amounts of time. The Windows Azure-based external service and data storage can be used as one of the possible configurations of the system to minimize the customer's own computing resources. The purpose of the service is mass document processing, their conversion into a platform-independent preview format, and access to the processed documents' previews. The following Windows Azure features have been used during the project's development:

• BLOB storage
• Table storage
• Queues
• Workers
• Web roles
• Multi tenancy for data storage and processing
• On-demand scalability for both the processing units and the storage

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