Signiant added these notifications to the system as well, so that support engineers could see successful delivery statuses in addition to bounces. Shortly after this version of the system was released, SES added the ability to capture notifications for deliveries in addition to bounces.
#Signiant media shuttle version update#
The application would poll the queue and update a local database that the support team could then search through a simple web UI. The bounce notifications were delivered via the Amazon SNS topic to an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue. In the next iteration of the solution, the email list was replaced by a database-backed web application running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Pretty soon, there were thousands of notifications flooding the support team’s inboxes, and searching for a given customer’s email quickly became cumbersome. This provided simple alerts to the support team when emails bounced and was very easy to implement, but it presented scalability problems as adoption of the product grew. The initial solution, depicted below, was to subscribe an internal email distribution list to the Amazon SNS topic that received the bounce notifications. To improve the support team’s ability to resolve these issues while maintaining the privacy of the sender and email content, Signiant developed a simple system for tracking email bounces that has evolved over time. These notification emails will occasionally bounce or be caught in spam filtering systems which prevents users from retrieving their files, and generally results in a support call from the sender to figure out why the email was never received. When a file becomes available, the system will send an email to the user with a secure link for downloading the content. One key feature of Media Shuttle is its delivery notification system, built on Amazon SES. Media Shuttle takes care of the transfer acceleration, security, scalability, elasticity, and resource management on the user’s behalf. Using a simple browser plugin or mobile app, users can send or share files of any size through a simple portal. This product is used pervasively within the media and entertainment industry to quickly transfer very large files. Signiant’s SaaS solution on AWS is called Media Shuttle. In this post, I will walk through how Signiant has re-architected its SaaS solution on AWS to take advantage of the capabilities of AWS Lambda and a serverless architecture. Each iteration of the company’s system has made improvements to the scalability and operational efficiency of the solution, culminating in a simple, Lambda-based serverless architecture. Over time, Signiant has re-architected its solution on AWS that leverages the bounce and delivery notifications provided by Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), via an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Signiant, an Advanced APN Technology Partner, Digital Media Competency Partner, and Storage Competency Partner, is a textbook example of a firm who has put this pattern into practice. This can afford immediate reductions in infrastructure costs and operational surface area as well as provide valuable experience in building and running systems using this new paradigm. The first step in this journey is often to re-engineer ancillary workloads that can be easily re-implemented without servers. I work with many SaaS partners who are now leveraging the serverless model for various components of their architecture. When AWS Lambda was launched in 2014, it unlocked an ability for AWS customers and partners to implement full-featured, scalable solutions without the need to deploy or manage any servers.
By Mike Deck, Partner Solutions Architect, AWS