HiLife: Building Smarter Living With AWS Cloud

HiLife Interactive reached out to InfoFabrica for help with its data centre migration as it expanded into Thailand and Vietnam. With over 60,000 users in Singapore and more expected from new markets, HiLife was under increasing pressure to maintain 99.9% availability without compromising scalability. This influx of new users meant that HiLife needed to manually intervene whenever it could not cope with the varying application traffic load.

As HiLife was growing its business, it needed to place greater focus on enhancing its smart community application, HiLife. Although it had already chosen Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its IT demands, HiLife recognised that it had grown to a point where it needed a trusted cloud consulting partner to help deploy new IT infrastructure. To help solve this problem, it turned to InfoFabrica, an Premium Consulting Partner in AWS Partner Network (APN).

Why Amazon Web Services

“AWS is widely recognised for a number of strengths. When we
established HiLife four years ago, the most important business need
for us was flexibility, in order to grow quickly. AWS provided us with
affordable flexibility to support our business growth” says Charles Ji
Chao, co-founder of HiLife Interactive. “Now, as we expand overseas,
AWS and InfoFabrica’s regional presence gives me the confidence it
will continue to support HiLife every step of the way.”
“Clients want to focus on delivering value to their customers, without
being bogged down with non-core functions. As the pace of
innovation – and customer demand for innovative products –
accelerates, they can look forward to leveraging the combined
technical expertise of AWS and InfoFabrica to shorten time to
market,” says Peter Huynh, regional channel marketing director at
InfoFabrica.
HiLife uses Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) to handle
all of its processing and computational needs, Amazon Relational
Database Service (Amazon RDS) for data structure and querying,
and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for backup
repository. In addition to the regional presence that AWS provides,
HiLife also appreciated that it received regular updates on new
features that were on the horizon – an important differentiator for it

Mutual Benefits with InfoFabrica

HiLife immediately saw the value in the AWS pay-for-what-you-use
pricing model, in addition to the impressive scalability of Amazon
EC2. “We were able to roll out our smart lifestyle application in
Thailand and Vietnam and were confident of supporting the activities
of thousands of condominium residents from day one,” says Ji Chao.
“We also didn’t have to worry about navigating the complexities of
setting up operations overseas, and were able to offload the
management of IT services to InfoFabrica.”

InfoFabrica recommended Amazon RDS Multi-Availability Zone
deployment to HiLife, for enhanced availability and durability. This
proved suitable for HiLife’s production workload, and its planned
expansion into larger markets, including India and China. With this
implementation, HiLife can perform automatic failover to standby
database instances. In the past, HiLife would spend six to twelve
hours a day to conduct its own investigation in the event of a fault.
Now, HiLife stays up-and-running automatically, without the need for
manual intervention.
With Amazon S3, HiLife does not need to size and invest upfront in
storage backup. InfoFabrica also recommended a Managed Backup
Service for EC2 and RDS instances, and File System Backup with
CloudBerry, the Storage Technology Competency Partner in the APN.
With these solutions, the backup success rate has been at a high of
99%, which traditional backup solutions would find hard to emulate.
With backups spanning multiple countries, CloudBerry’s Centralised
Management Console, along with its native support for AWS, enables
HiLife to monitor all backup operations from a single view. This
provides HiLife with the ability to consolidate notifications and
reporting, while having a complete overview of the state of all
managed backups. When there is a disruption, rather than
individually querying every backup operation, HiLife now has
complete visibility at a glance, reducing troubleshooting time by 70
percent.
As its IT operations became more complex, HiLife was concerned
about the cost of growing its IT team. It had to consider the
possibility of adding specialists like network administrators, hardware
experts, and software programmers. By working with InfoFabrica,
HiLife IT usage remains flexible and nimble, while keeping costs low.
It could also tap into InfoFabrica’s extensive experience to support
its business needs.
After establishing a strong foundation in Singapore, Thailand, and
Vietnam, HiLife is poised for further growth. In the year ahead, it is
looking to expand into India, the Philippines, and China. The
company is also considering a foray into the commercial space, after
seeing its success in the residential market. HiLife will continue to
rely on InfoFabrica to reduce its in-house IT needs, allowing it to
focus on business development, expand its product offerings, and

Professional Services & Managed Services
by InfoFabrica

As its IT operations became more complex, HiLife was concerned
about the cost of growing its IT team. It had to consider the
possibility of adding specialists like network administrators, hardware
experts, and software programmers. HiLife engaged InfoFabrica
Managed Services to manage its IT operations in AWS. InfoFabrica
Managed Services provided HiLife with capacity planning insights,
periodic architecture reviews to align their infrastructure with their
business needs, backup management and proactive monitoring. By
engaging InfoFabrica Managed Services, HiLife gained access to a
team of AWS professionals while keeping costs low.

High Level Solution Diagram