My first AWS project — and the first customer onboarded to Network Redux’s Managed Cloud Services. Built a scalable infrastructure for a US-based online auction marketplace and real-time bidding platform. What started as a classic AWS stack in 2016 evolved over the years into a fully modernized, containerized platform on Amazon EKS.
Context
The customer needed a reliable, auto-scaling infrastructure to handle unpredictable traffic spikes during live auctions. Real-time bidding demanded low-latency database operations and the ability to scale compute on demand. This was 2015 — many AWS features we take for granted today didn’t exist yet.
What I Did
Initial Build (2015)
- Designed the full AWS architecture — Route 53, ELB, EC2 Auto Scaling Groups, RDS, and DynamoDB
- Configured Amazon DynamoDB for the real-time auction engine
- Set up 3rd-party CDN for image caching and static asset delivery
- Built Ansible playbooks for baking AMIs with Nginx and PHP stacks
- Implemented CI/CD with AWS CodeDeploy and CodePipeline
- Provisioned all resources using CloudFormation templates — reverse-engineered from a YAML file left by a previous contractor on a bastion host, then rewritten and standardized. Those templates became the foundation for most stacks we provisioned at Network Redux
The DynamoDB Challenge
- DynamoDB auto-scaling didn’t exist at the time. Implemented Dynamic DynamoDB — a script-based solution that monitored DynamoDB metrics and scaled tables up/down based on custom policies. It worked like a charm.
Evolution Over the Years
- This customer was always the first to green-light upgrades whenever AWS introduced new services
- Over time, migrated the entire platform to a modernized, containerized architecture:
- Amazon EKS for container orchestration
- Karpenter with Spot instance fleet for cost-efficient compute
- Aurora Serverless replacing RDS
- ArgoCD for GitOps-based deployments
Results
| Metric | Detail |
|---|---|
| Starting point | Classic EC2 + RDS + DynamoDB stack (2015) |
| Final state | Fully containerized on EKS with Karpenter + ArgoCD |
| DynamoDB scaling | Custom auto-scaling before AWS native support existed |
| Infrastructure as Code | CloudFormation templates that became the standard for Network Redux |
| Customer relationship | Multi-year engagement — continuously modernized |
A happy, forward-thinking customer that helped me kick-start solution engineering on AWS Cloud. Always grateful to Randy Ehli.
Stack
2015: Route 53 · ELB · EC2 Auto Scaling · DynamoDB · RDS · CloudFormation · Ansible · CodeDeploy · CodePipeline · Dynamic DynamoDB
Final: Amazon EKS · Karpenter · Spot Instances · Aurora Serverless · ArgoCD · GitOps