Executive Summary
AAIC, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, is using its AWS Service Delivery Program authorization to accelerate business growth and build its client confidence. The company’s strength is in its AWS skills and expertise through which it helped a leading sales tech platform in going serverless with zero deployment failure within 3 months.
About Client – 7Targets AI Sales Assistant
7Targets is a leading sales tech platform focused on sales force efficiency and productivity using its patented AI-based lead nurturing solution. It has a flagship product ‘AI Sales Assistant’ which can write emails and do follow-ups with the leads as well as read the received responses and act accordingly.
Expertise with Different Service Delivery Programs makes Applied AI Consulting an Effective AWS Partner
AAIC is an AWS advanced consulting partner with expertise in AWS lambda as well as other services. Being a Cloud System Integrator (CSI), it enables enterprises to create their application and big-data workloads safely to the AWS cloud with improved governance.
Applied AI Consulting has deep knowledge of Native AWS services and the best practices. AAIC has worked with scores of customers for service delivery.
Its 20+ AWS certifications and 7+ active cloud projects, make it a reliable partner for cloud-based projects that effectively showcase its expertise with:
- Amazon API Gateway Delivery
- Amazon CloudFront Delivery
- AWS Lambda Delivery
- AWS WAF Delivery
- AWS CloudFormation Delivery
“We offer enterprises the best-in-class cloud deployment, CloudOps, cloud integration, networking, and data engineering services over AWS. And our growing customer base and positive feedback from them is a clear indicator of service excellence .”
- Vijay Roy, CEO, Applied AI Consulting
AAIC Identifying 7Targets Challenges
7Targets provides an email-based AI Sales Assistant and a SaaS solution. The infrequent load of processing the received email via an event-driven architecture was one critical need. Apart from that, there was the requirement of externalizing the processing of sending and receiving emails. And that with a possibility of managing (start, stop, restart, etc) each of the leads and emails for supportability reasons.
Here are a few of the challenges from them:
- The cost of running was not in control and they needed pay-as-you-use mechanism without losing the security and elasticity aspect.
- Their process lacked of an externalized way to manage the flow for sending and receiving emails.
- Their existing monolith service was behind the load balancer with autoscaling, but the scale-up and scale down was not helping as the load was very infrequent throughout the day, multiple times.
- They needed upgrades with zero downtime.
Ultimately, they were looking for an AWS Partner who is adept in native AWS services. Specifically, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Step Functions, AWS S3, AWS Cognito, AWS Lambda, Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon ECS Fargate, and Amazon Cloudwatch. And AAIC fulfilled all their requirements criteria.
AAIC Resolving 7Targets Challenges and Helping it Go Serverless with Zero Downtime
After understanding their challenges, the code structure, and the different microservices, the Applied AI team proposed the utilization of different AWS services to best suit their requirement.
Some of the major steps taken are:
- Creating the step functions( state machine process lead, process lead response, etc) with various AWS lambda functions for each step. Where we used Python runtime and serverless.io framework. This gave the required control the customer needed for externalization of flow.
- Sending the accepted received email in the S3 bucket using SES and processing them using lambda and step functions.
- Processing the received response and categorizing based on an ML model running in lambda and certain properties available in the response like date, etc helped them keep the cost of the ML stack low.
- To provide ease of development and deployment without any downtime we used Lambda functions and API Gateway.
- Used Amazon CloudFront to Improve the access speed for downloading the content for their customers.
- Helped them go serverless with Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB, AWS ECS Fargate, and RDS.
- We used Python as the primary language which gave them confidence as the skill was not new to them.
- Deploying and using the ML model from Lambda helped them get valuable inferences at a minimal cost.
- Also, our usage of Comprehend gave them some quick wins.
- Automated test to verify before deployments.
- Additionally, we used AWS data migration services, ECR, and AWS cloud formation for utilizing related AWS and third-party resources.
Why AWS?
It’s a no-brainer that AWS is packed with all the go-to solutions for making a cost-effective and reliable solution on the cloud. Companies of all sizes understand it and use it to scale and resolve their various challenges. Some of the core reasons for 7Targets to choose AWS are mentioned below:
- AWS services seemed more mature to the client to improve their current situation. Like AWS WAF, load balancers, step functions, secret managers, and more.
- The client already knew about the AAIC and its advanced consultancy partnership with AWS.
- The team (both 7Targets and AAIC) had experience and expertise on AWS.
Why the Customer Chose AAIC as their AWS Partner
The following factors influenced their decision to choose AAIC:
- AAIC’s serverless-api-generator tool that generates production-ready REST API code along with UTs and the pipelines. The AAIC team had many services on serverless beyond the ECS. And the client knew this generator would be useful for getting pipelines quickly.
- Usage of aws_lambda_powertools ensured the customer that AAIC brings the required standards too.
- The AAIC AWS-certified and experienced team of cloud engineers.
- AAIC’s similar previous work helped them take this decision.
- Also, AAIC’s DevOps accelerator [DevOps-in-a-box] that potentially reduces the DevOps pipeline implementation by 60% got their attention.
Future Plans
The AWS partner and the client continue to work together. Keeping a tab on production and MLOps is key for the client, which AAIC helps with. Cost optimization is a continuous process and AAIC does great there. Also, new feature development and maintenance of existing is a critical responsibility.
As the 7Targets production DB and usage increases, they need to continue to improve on using properly sized resources, upgrade databases, etc, and AAIC helps there.
AWS Services Used as Part of the Solution
AWS S3, AWS ECR, AWS Lambda, AWS ECS Fargate, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Secrets Manager, Amazon SNS, Dynamo DB, AWS step functions, AWS WAF, Cognito, RDS.
Benefits
- Usage of serverless for inference using the ML model has helped the customer from a cost perspective.
- Usage of Lambda and Step function that scaled easily to their increasing load with increasing customers.
- The monitoring dashboard using AWS Cloudwatch gives a very clear picture of the workload and health
7Targets Solution Architecture
