ABOUT:

The Shalom Catholic Community is an International Private Association of the Faithful, with legal personality, recognized by the Holy See with the decree of February 22, 2007, from the then Pontifical Council for the Laity (whose competencies and functions are currently assumed by the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life). On the same date, in 2012, its statutes received definitive approval.

Present in dozens of countries around the world, the Shalom Catholic Community is formed by men and women who, within the diversity of forms of life present in the Church, commit themselves to a community and missionary life in order to bring the Gospel of Jesus Cristo to all men and women, especially those far from Christ and the Church.

CHALLENGE:

The Shalom Community needed to host its main institutional website, in addition to some sub-sites, which were facing several outages due to being hosted in a local data center. Along with the downtime issue, performance was not meeting the standards required for the smooth operation of the website. By migrating to AWS, the goal was to keep costs close to what was already being paid while improving the service provided.

In search of another provider that would meet their needs, they turned to AWS. Since CodeBit is an Amazon Web Services Select Tier partner and serves other institutes and foundations, AWS appointed CodeBit as the partner responsible for the project.

In 2020, there arose a need to migrate the entire existing website structure to AWS, as well as to set up continuous integration (automated deployment) for all applications. This solution had to deliver the best performance at the lowest possible cost, and after a study, Codebit suggested the solution that best addressed these challenges.

SOLUTION:

It was decided that the solution to host the website with the lowest cost, highest availability, and best possible performance would be the use of EC2 Reserved Instances, utilizing auto-scaling groups, and RDS as the database service.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a computing service that allows optimal sizing of the server to be used for each need.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a managed database hosting service provided by AWS.

RESULTS:

• Drastic reduction in instabilities.

• Identification of slow queries using RDS Performance Insights.

• Improved performance across all websites.

• Maintenance of costs compared to the old hosting.

As a result, there were several benefits, such as:

• Automatic scaling – by setting up an auto-scaling group, the environment grows and shrinks according to the current workload, preventing over-provisioning of resources.

• High availability – Amazon Web Services ensures high availability of its services by having multiple data centers within the same region, in addition to the quality of its equipment which rarely fails.

• Performance analysis – The database performance analysis service helps identify slow queries and spikes in database consumption, directly assisting the application developer in fixing errors that consume excessive resources.