Use AWS as Cloud Provider

Status

Approved

Context

Using a managed service powered by a public cloud provider vs managing everything on our own affects a lot of the architectural characeristics:

Scalability (out-of-the-box)
Maintainability
Deployability

Decision

The Spotlight platform will use Amazon AWS as the cloud provider.

Rationale

Easier maintanability and deployability of the overall system.
On premise deployments require dedicated support and are hard to scale.
With managed services, scalability comes out-of-the box.
Because of microservice based architecture, many different types of infrastructural components need to be deployed. Gaining deployment expertise for all components compared to gaining expertise for a single cloud provider reduces the effort considerably.

Alternatives considered

Other cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform were evaluated. However, none of them match the maturity and feature capabilities of AWS.
- For example, Redis based cache is highly utilized in the Spotlight App architecture. As per Azure docs, Zone redundancy support only works with non-clustered and non-geo-replicated caches currently. In addition, it doesn’t support private link, scaling, data persistence, or import/export. On the contrary, AWS supports zone redundancy in cluster mode with geo-replication.
In terms of costs too, we found that AWS offerings are cheaper that Azure and Google Cloud Platform. See the price comparison for managed Redis cache here.

Consequences

Engineers responsible for deployment (devops) need to be trained for AWS services.