Baobab Ebooks Services – Migration to the AWS Cloud
Baobab Ebooks is a pioneering digital ebooks service to academic libraries in Africa. The company sells ebooks to academic libraries and hosts the content on a platform that mimics the lending arrangements in a conventional library.
The company started work with a dedicated server and storage hosted with a conventional co-location provider. The company’s first server quickly became overwhelmed with the volume of storage required for the publisher content hosted by the platform and so Amazon S3 was investigated as a storage solution that could cost-effectively host and encrypt content. Further evolution is cost management took place as active titles were hosted in S3 and inactive data moved to Amazon Glacier.
As the dedicated server approached end-of-life the decision was taken to migrate the entire platform to Amazon’s services, using EC2, EBS and S3.
The company quickly established live infrastructure, comprising 4 EC2 instances in Dublin and a development and DR solution in London. Storage in S3 holds publisher content and data for the on-line reading tools which is served directly from S3.
Future plans include migrating the database to Amazon Aurora and leveraging EC2’s flexibility to manage an operating system upgrade from Centos 6 to Centos 7 without down time.
Baobab Ebooks Services is managed by Broadband Cloud Solutions (BCS) under AWS organizations. BCS provides architecture advice on the Amazon platform and supports and manages the operational infrastructure on behalf of the business.
