Assam Power Distribution Company Ltd (APDCL), is a decade old organization incorporated in 2009 as a public limited company for managing electricity distribution and supply in Assam and nearby areas. Under Assam State Electricity Board, the company operates and manages state electricity distribution systems and its assets.
Challenges
APDCL was majorly operating manually. The bills were printed and the payments were collected manually. Customers would stand in long queues to pay the bills. This was tedious both for the staff and customers. Also, maintaining records of bill payments was a time-consuming process. The number of customers started to increase and the pressure was building up. The organization was looking for a solution that could make the bill payment process easier and faster without any compromise on safety. So, it developed an application with an on-premise data centre for hosting it. While this gave APDCL customers an opportunity to make online payments, the web page was extremely slow in loading and availability suffered significantly as users increased. As a result, APDCL customers could hardly use the online portal for payment and retorted to manual queues.
Solution
We offered APDCL a cloud solution for the hosting of their web and mobile applications for payment collection. However, when working with online payments, security was a major concern of the organization. So, we provided APDCL a proof of concept to assure them of the safety of cloud.
While on-premise data centre that was used earlier had its limitations, the cloud-based solution eliminated it as the organization could consume digital assets from an unlimited capacity of cloud as and when they needed. With the new cloud solution, the payment processes could be easily automated such that the customers would get the convenience of making payments online easily from anywhere without the need to stand in queues. The payments were recorded instantly and automatically.
Implementation
We evaluated multiple cloud solutions based on the needs of APDCL and finally selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) for it which offered a large variety of services under single umbrella, had proven performance achievements, was mature in the cloud space, and flexible in costing to fit different business models.
Squaricle being Amazon partner for cloud computing helped APDCL implement set of Amazon Web Services based on their application requirements. These included –
Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2): As the user base was not fixed and the data was increasing day by day in quantity, the organization needed to be flexible in its capacities. So, we implemented EC2 as it offered resizable compute capacity such that additional capacities could be configured easily as and when needed to build the infrastructure on the cloud.
Relational Database Service (RDS): The APDCL application was to handle a huge number of users and this needed high speed in data retrieval which was possible only with a fast and reliable production database. RDS offers high availability, performance optimization, security and ease of administration. Managing database requires one to perform a variety of administrative tasks such as provisioning of hardware, setup, creation of backups, and timely patch ups. This was all managed through RDS automatically which made its administration easy. Moreover, AWS provided a variety of cost-effective storage options that we could optimize for desired performance of APDCL application.
Simple Storage Service (S3): APDCL needed to keep its historical data archived for records and retrieval later. S3 is a scalable storage solution that allows data to be stored in buckets and can handle any kind of data such websites, use cases, backups, mobile applications and more. Millions of application data is stored on S3 with 99.999999999% of its durability, a benefit that could not be missed when selecting it as an option for APDCL storage and archival.
Simple Notification Service (SNS): APDCL needed to keep its customers informed of progress, errors and other application generated information. Thus, a performance management application was integrated with SNS so that automatic alerts could be sent to customers whenever they faced an issue. SNS is a fully managed service that enables sending of push-based notifications and messages to a large number of subscribers through mobile, email and SMS.
APDCL cloud infrastructure today has a combination of database service, compute unit, storage service and network service with each offering high availability, durability, reliability, performance, scalability, and security. Its cloud application runs over a million data executions every single day without any compromise in speed, reliability and performance.