Faladdin Implements AWS CloudFront for Effortless Mobile Backend Deployment

Faladdin is an AI based Fortune Teller app on the App Store and Google Play, which has been downloaded by more than 25 million people around the globe. Faladdin offers individual analysis about life by combining its deep learning skills and ancient knowledge of mystical disciplines like Tarot, Astrology, Clairvoyance and Coffee Cup Reading. Faladdin does more than 1 million readings daily, with 5 million active users monthly. Award winning Faladdin application uses artificial intelligence technology to generate fortune telling responses.

Faladdin was a fast-growing startup which had difficulties continuing to scale up at local data centers. The company had difficulties in performance, reliability, and future capacity planning. Migration to global cloud service providers’ environment was an obvious solution and AWS was decided as optimum alternative among the choices.

Commencis first ran a proof-of-concept project where the subset of Faladdin backend application was migrated successfully with AWS funding. After this step, Commencis proposed a full migration scope of work and plan to AWS Ireland region from local data center which was accepted by Faladdin.

Commencis migration team worked on the migration project on different tracks. After finalizing the cloud architecture and low-level design with the customer, the next step was to prepare the landing zone including network and security structure according to the design decisions.

After preparing the landing zone, the next step was to set up EKS cluster with its nodes and load balancer.

Jenkins: is used for CI/CD pipeline for EKS deployments.

Major AWS services used in the solution are:
Cloudfront: content delivery service to get dynamic and static content securely and faster.
EKS: managed Kubernetes cluster service of AWS
EC2: worker nodes of the EKS cluster
Aurora MySQL: database of the application
Elastic Load Balancer: traffic distribution of the mobile application requests.
Redshift/Quicksight: the services used for data analytics and reporting.
ElasticSearch: the service is used for faster search.
ElastiCache: the service is used to retrieve data from cache.
S3: used to store application contents.
VPC Peering: used to establish connectivity between VPCs of Faladdin’s AWS Accounts.
Route 53: used for domain name resolution.

After the successful migration, Faladdin had its production and test environments at AWS Ireland region. The new environment that was designed according to the customer’s performance, reliability, and future capacity planning requirements, is operating well without a major problem since then.

The production workload size after the migration has increased, and the AWS consumption has increased in parallel by more than %100 since the migration.

Architecture diagram of Faladdin Migration project showing:

• Cloudfront service
• VPC structure of production account
• Compute, database, network, storage services
• Other AWS Services in the solution

Main technical requirements shared by Faladdin are:

• Run Faladdin mobile application’s backend in secure, reliable, and scalable environment.
• Deploy the application’s release with minimum downtime. Establish world-class CI/CD pipelines for different environments (dev, test, prod) for secure and fast deployments.
• Control and monitor the cost, reliability, and performance of the system continuously with taking quick actions when needed.

By leveraging on AWS Cloudfront along with other AWS services, Faladdin could successfully deployed serve its mobile backend applications to cloud including its production and test environments.