Case Study

Delivering A Well-Architected Non-Profit Advocacy Campaign on AWS

Services Provided: Web Development, Managed Security Services, Cloud Management

The Vulnerable People Project (VPP) works tirelessly around the world to serve the most vulnerable populations in often hostile situations. VPP came to us with an urgent need related to supporting Afghan allies still stuck in Afghanistan.

Customer Challenges & Goals

VPP came to us with a number of challenges related to delivering the Afghan Ally Voices campaign. We met the challenge and utilized various AWS services to do so with strong security and performance.

The Afghan Ally Voices website and its companion Ally Testimony web application infrastructure had to balance and accomplish the following objectives:

Deliver a well-designed and performant advocacy site and app in a week
Deliver high-grade security to protect sensitive personal information that could have physical security consequences
Deliver a high-quality design and web infrastructure while optimizing costs to fit a non-profit campaign budget
Ensure the durability of rich media assets and personal information stored by the web application, but within strict cost constraints

Solution Details

We deliver Next.js apps and our web application frameworks via an automated CI/CD process that runs a multi-tier architecture with various highly-available and durable AWS services.

Advocacy Campaign Website

We implemented the advocacy campaign website via our Next.js AWS reference architecture that we deploy and manage via Terraform. Next.js is a leading React front-end web development framework that delivers rich functionality and performance for every project.

Next.js static website delivered via AWS CloudFront and S3 with AWS cloud-native CI/CD automation.

Ally Testimony Collection Web Application

We delivered the testimony collection web application using one of our Dockerized web application frameworks of choice (framework details withheld for security purposes).

The web application collects, validates, and secures user-generated content in text, audio, and video format. VPP staff can securely access a simple dashboard for testimony review and processing.

The web application utilizes Amazon Aurora RDS for PostgreSQL to deliver a highly performant, available, secure, and scalable database tier.

By utilizing our Next.js and Dockerized web application reference architectures in their own AWS account (which we manage for them), VPP gained the efficiency and simplicity of a SaaS solution while retaining ownership and custody of data, performance, and security.

Web Application Architecture Highlights

Database tier via Amazon Aurora RDS PostgreSQL Engine with automated daily backups, a 14 day database snapshot retention policy, and the ability to implement reader and writer node architectures for performance needs.
Durable object storage for critical user-generated testimony content via Amazon S3
Dockerized web application built and deployed to EC2 by CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
Daily and release-level CVE security scanning and alerting
CDN, SSL termination, and AWS WAF protection via Amazon CloudFront
EC2 OS-level maintenance automation via Systems Manager
Overall performance and security monitoring via CloudWatch metrics and alarms

Screenshot of the custom web application that collects testimonies in written, video, or audio format.

Customer Success

We delivered well-architected advocacy campaign solutions for VPP that met their non-profit budget, timeline, and campaign security needs. They can rest assured that their advocacy informational website is responsive and performant under pressure, and that their ally testimony data is durably stored with proper backups, security controls, and performance optimizations.