Day 59 – Re-Architecting VProfile Web App on AWS

Yesterday, I deployed my VProfile application on AWS using a Lift and Shift strategy with EC2 instances.
Today, I took it a step further and re-architected the app to leverage AWS Managed Services (PaaS & SaaS) — making it more scalable, maintainable, and cost-efficient.

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🔹 Why Re-Architect?

While Lift and Shift is quick, it still leaves you managing a lot of infrastructure — patching servers, handling scaling, and configuring databases manually.
By switching to PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings, AWS takes over most of these operational tasks.

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🔹 AWS Services Used

1. Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) – replaced MySQL EC2 instance

   • Fully managed database

   • Automated backups, patching, and replication

2. Amazon ElastiCache – replaced Memcached EC2 instance

   • Managed caching service

   • Boosts performance with in-memory caching

3. Amazon MQ – replaced RabbitMQ EC2 instance

   • Managed message broker service for reliable communication

4. AWS Elastic Beanstalk – deployed the Spring MVC app without manually provisioning servers

   • Handles provisioning, scaling, and monitoring automatically

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🔹 Architecture Changes

Before:

• Multiple EC2 instances for DB, caching, messaging, and app server

• Manual configuration and scaling

After:

• Application deployed on Elastic Beanstalk

• RDS for persistent relational database storage

• ElastiCache for high-speed caching

• Amazon MQ for messaging

• AWS handles patching, backups, scaling automatically

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🔹 DB Initialization

To set up the database with our existing dump:

mysql -h <rds-endpoint> -u <db_user> -p accounts < db_backup.sql

This connects directly to the RDS endpoint instead of a local EC2 instance.

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🔹 Key Benefits

✅ Reduced infrastructure management overhead
✅ Built-in scalability and high availability
✅ Faster deployments with Elastic Beanstalk
✅ Cost savings by paying only for managed service usage

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📌 Next Step: I’ll get into basics of version control and git

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