Revolutionizing Communication: AWS Chime SDK and OpenSearch powered application
How PPT Boosted Bazaar Room's Platform Capabilities on AWS
Particular Presence Technologies Ltd (PPT) is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Select Partner, with a Lambda Service Delivery designation, which validates our team members’ in-depth knowledge of AWS services and our experience in the field. At PPT, we are proponents of digital transformation and prioritize the security, reliability, and strength of our solutions. Our development team members are all industry certified to deliver the best results to drive business value.
PPT is a Software Development and Technology company based in Kingston, Jamaica. We pride ourselves on our keen ability to solve problems, innovate, and provide value for all our clients. Our expertise in building scalable products has led to partnerships with organizations in the Banking & Finance, Education, and Insurance industries.
Bazaar Room leveraged PPT's AWS expertise and a serverless technology architecture to build an innovative online platform that connects businesses and skill sellers in a cost-optimized manner. Using AWS cloud services, they were able to rapidly develop a feature-rich web platform.
The Case Study
The Challenge
Bazaar Room, a burgeoning online platform startup, sought to address a critical business need by simplifying the process for entrepreneurs and solopreneurs to effectively showcase their skills, offerings, and services in the highly competitive digital landscape. They recognized the challenges niche experts face in gaining visibility namely outdated promotion tactics, exploitative middlemen, limitations of closed social platforms and therefore aimed to develop a purpose-built online ecosystem to cater to the passion economy. This platform would enable direct business-to-consumer collaboration around talents, skills, and interest-based expertise areas. Their goal of having a robust portal with a suite of features such as content sharing, search functionality, real time communication etc. that was scalable and cost optimizing posed a complex technical challenge for their internal resource and therefore needed cloud native expertise to take the technical lead as their passion project.
Bazaar Room is an online platform startup aiming to address a pressing business need - making it easier for entrepreneurs and solopreneurs to effectively promote their skills, offerings and services in the highly competitive digital landscape. However, building such an extensive portal with features like content sharing, search, real-time communication etc. was a complex technical challenge.As a growing startup, Bazaar Room wanted to implement the platform in a scalable yet cost-optimized manner. They selected AWS as their cloud provider owing to a multitude of factors - global infrastructure, reliability, security, ease of building complex solutions via managed services, and competitive pricing. This provided a strong foundation to scale the platform globally.However, despite adopting AWS, they lacked specialized expertise to architect the solution leveraging cloud-native services. They partnered with Particular Presence Technologies (PPT), an AWS specialty consultancy with proven success in migrating applications to the cloud by smartly combining AWS building blocks.
Solution
In Bazaar Room’s quest of ensuring that its platform fulfilled their two core needs of scalability and cost optimization, it selected AWS as their cloud provider. They were attracted to AWS' widely acclaimed strengths, including global infrastructure, reliability, security features, the ease of constructing sophisticated solutions through managed services, and competitive pricing. Despite identifying the best suited cloud provider,AWS, Bazaar room lacked the specialized expertise to architect the solution and leverage the cloud-native services. Bazaar Room therefore partnered with Particular Presence Technologies (PPT), an AWS specialty consultant partner with proven success in migrating applications to the cloud to architect their ambitious goal.
PPT Molds Vision into Reality Using AWS Services Catalog
Over months of relentless design thinking sessions and requirement analysis, PPT converted Bazaar Room's aspirations into an executable technology roadmap powered by a myriad of AWS cloud services including:
- Amazon Opensearch for indexed platform search to match seekers and skilled sellers
- AWS Rekognition identifying inappropriate video uploads
- Amazon Chime enabling seamless 1-to-1 video calls between platform inhabitants
- Amazon DynamoDB providing resilience for mission-critical marketplace transactions
Today, as the Bazaar Room platform continues evolving as per their North Star vision, PPT's involvement stands testament to how niche cloud consultants can successfully pair with startups to unleash the business potential of AWS' technologies. The collaboration remains a resounding validation of AWS' central role in powering and inspiring innovation among early-stage disruptors daring to challenge the status quo.
AWS Technologies Used on the Project
Used for indexing, searching user profiles and business/skills content; Enables filtered search capabilities
Analyzes uploaded videos to filter out inappropriate content
Provides real-time audio/video calling and chat/messaging capabilities
Manages user profiles and video metadata; Allows easy profile updates and video uploads
Provides highly scalable and secure video file storage
Runs platform code without managing servers. Enables scalable, cost-effective compute
Runs platform code without managing servers. Enables scalable, cost-effective compute
Runs platform code without managing servers. Enables scalable, cost-effective compute
Runs platform code without managing servers. Enables scalable, cost-effective compute
Runs platform code without managing servers. Enables scalable, cost-effective compute
Runs platform code without managing servers. Enables scalable, cost-effective compute
Runs platform code without managing servers. Enables scalable, cost-effective compute
Lambda-based event-driven architecture for Bazaar Room
Lambda functions formed the core scalable compute fabric for Bazaar Room’s platform backend - bringing reliability, cost and operational efficiencies through a serverless design.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda enabled a resilient, auto-scalable serverless architecture for Bazaar Room by:
- Executing core platform operations like user authentication, notifications, video handling etc as triggered Lambda functions
- Enabling on-demand compute scalability to automatically accommodate usage spikes
- Integrating Lambda with supportive services including: Amazon Rekognition for automated content filtering; Amazon Chime SDK for real-time communications; Amazon DynamoDB for managing profile data; Reducing total cost of ownership by providing fine-grained pay-per-use pricing; Allowing focus on innovation and optimizing end-user experience without server provisioning or management overheads
Bazaar Room Unlocks Enhanced Search and Real-time Analytics via Amazon OpenSearch Service
By leveraging OpenSearch Service, Bazaar Room could focus on platform innovation rather than search infrastructure management. The fully handled search engines and analytics backends enhanced platform capabilities and user experience through relevant discovery and data-driven decisions.
Amazon OpenSearch Service enabled powerful search and real-time analytics for Bazaar Room through a fully managed service:
- Intuitive search and discovery of user profiles, skills and businesses
- Custom filtering for more relevant search results
- Scalable indexing ingesting platform data seamlessly
- Rich analytics dashboards providing actionable business insights
- Serverless deployments to automatically scale search clusters
- Reduced total cost of ownership versus self-managed solutions
Inappropriate Video Detection by Amazon Rekognition for Bazaar Room
Bazaar Room leveraged Amazon Rekognition, AWS's machine learning image and video analysis service, to moderate user-generated video content uploaded onto their platform.
Rekognition enabled automated, instant moderation of bulk video uploads on Bazaar Room in a scalable manner. This kept their community safe while minimizing manual review effort, allowing focus on core platform growth.
- Users upload videos on Bazaar Room to showcase skills, offerings, and products.
- Rekognition's video moderation is integrated for efficient content filtering.
- ML models in Rekognition automatically detect objectionable material (e.g., nudity, violence).
- Flagged videos are automatically removed from public view to prevent their discovery.
- Bazaar Room's admin team reviews the moderated list to address false positives.
- Safe videos incorrectly flagged can be reinstated upon review.
Quality In-platform calls and messaging with Amazon Chime
Amazon Chime formed the communication backbone enabling human-centric interactivity through messaging and high-definition video, helping Bazaar Room residents forge meaningful relationships and conduct business globally.
- Amazon Chime enables high-quality video and audio calls for direct engagements.
- Integration humanizes interactions, fostering trust and rapport.
- Instant messaging and file/link sharing accelerate community interaction.
- ChimeSDK ensures real-time communication accessibility across browsers and mobile devices.
- Critical engagement capabilities available anytime, anywhere, even on the go.
Seamless Video Showcase with Amazon S3 Integration
Amazon S3 formed the storage substrate for videos that are a key engagement driver for the Bazaar Room platform. The integration delivered security, scalability and durability for video assets uploaded by the portal's community members.
- Bazaar Room allows users to upload videos showcasing their skills, products, services etc. These videos can be searched and viewed by potential clients.
- To store these video files in a durable, scalable and secure manner, the solution integrated Amazon S3 as the video storage layer.
- Uploaded videos were persisted in S3 buckets that are access controlled and encrypted as per best practices.
- Associating metadata like title, description for the videos enabled easier searching and retrieval from S3.
- Serverless processing capabilities were possibly leveraged via S3 Object Lambda to transform uploaded video formats on the fly.
- Integrations with other services like Rekognition (for moderation) and OpenSearch (for discovery) enabled richer video capabilities.
User Profile and Metadata management with DynamoDB
DynamoDB formed the foundational managed NoSQL data layer powering critical user profile and metadata access, portal transactions and ensured scalability - all leveraging DynamoDB's serverless capabilities.
- User Profile Management: Utilized DynamoDB's flexible NoSQL data model for storing and managing user profiles.
- Video Metadata Storage: Uploaded video files stored in Amazon S3 buckets. Stored related video metadata (titles, descriptions, duration, etc.) in DynamoDB for efficient search and retrieval.
- High-Performance Access: DynamoDB facilitated low-latency data access at scale for tasks like video uploads/downloads and profile CRUD operations. Ensured snappy response times to support high throughput portal workloads.
- Mission-Critical Support: Leveraged DynamoDB's resilience, backup capabilities, and reliability features. Supported mission-critical marketplace transactions and communication on Bazaar Room portal.
- Scalability: Utilized DynamoDB auto scaling to handle traffic spikes during events like promotional campaigns. Maintained performance while ensuring scalability.
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