Rockalingua Introduction
Rockalingua is an educational website with content for K-12 Spanish and French teachers and students. It offers interactive games, songs, videos, and printable materials to make language learning fun and effective. Trusted worldwide, Rockalingua empowers teaching with engaging and captivating resources.
Rockalingua’s challenges and Stormit’s solution
Rockalingua already had great, optimized architecture, but needed our team to help them with some tweaking. Thanks to a free AWS Well-Architected review, we could learn more about their needs without unnecessary costs and as always prioritize the things that need to be remedied.
Amazon CloudFront costs
Rockalingua contacted us seeking assistance with the pricing of Amazon CloudFront due to a noticeable increase in data transfer out costs. As their user base grew and more content was consumed, the expenses associated with delivering content to users escalated significantly. This growth in data transfer costs became a concern, impacting their overall budget and prompting them to explore more cost-effective solutions without compromising the quality and speed of content delivery to their global audience.
StormIT’s solution for CloudFront costs
We analyzed the organization's application requirements and proposed solutions for optimizing data transfer costs. Specifically, we optimized data transfer out to the public Internet. We addressed this issue by providing private pricing for Amazon CloudFront CDN which led to a 60% reduction in their content delivery expenses.
Storing debugging data
The Rockalingua team faced a significant challenge in managing and storing debugging data. They used a simple AWS Lambda function to store this data directly in an Amazon RDS database. To maintain database performance, they implemented a MySQL Event to delete rows older than one day, which unfortunately limited their ability to retain data for more extended periods (ideally one to two weeks) due to query performance issues. The customer considered exporting daily rows to SQL files and storing them in Amazon S3 Glacier, but they were also interested in exploring more robust solutions for data storage, management, and analytics.
StormIT’s solution for debugging data storage
We proposed utilizing AWS CloudWatch to efficiently manage the debugging data. By logging events directly to CloudWatch from the Lambda function, the customer could store structured JSON logs and use CloudWatch Log Insights to query the data similarly to a SQL database. This setup allows for the setting of a log expiration period, such as two weeks, balancing retention and performance approach that provides the customer with robust tools for data storage and obtaining valuable metrics, significantly enhancing their debugging capabilities.
Overall architecture review
After a discussion with the customer, we saw an opportunity to also do a Well-Architected review and try to find risks in their architecture and remediate them if possible.
Outcomes of well-architected review
The Well-Architected review highlighted Rockalingua's strong alignment with AWS best practices, particularly their use of serverless services. With Stormit's assistance, they further secured their AWS account and optimized their database configuration by placing it in a private subnet.
Results of the cooperation and conclusion
The partnership with Stormit has helped Rockalingua to better manage its AWS Cloud infrastructure, leading to cost savings, improved debugging data management, and a more secure and efficient architecture. These enhancements support Rockalingua's mission to provide high-quality educational content.
