For Minfy Technologies, NRC – Assam National Register of Citizen (NRC) is till date the biggest technology project and a massive drive to verify citizenship in India. It is aimed at identifying illegal immigrants who entered and settled in Assam. The current IT capacity of NRC is not even sized for one per cent of the expected traffic, with the 3.29 crore of applicants expected to do e-verification, right sizing and lead time to get the infrastructure, within a week’s time. For such a load, it is highly challenging and the capital investments required to build the physical infrastructure and the procurement process involved was the major challenge for NRC. A total of 3.11 crore of citizen had verified their identity on the NRC portal without any downtime or specific access issues. The serverless solution, leveraging AWS, has made this project a referenceable one for any government to citizen (G2C) type of solution where traffic predictability is a major challenge.
As the traffic will be highly unpredictable and of high volume, the current monolithic nature of the application would require to spun up more of servers and was not a cost optimised solution. Minfy helped to modernise their application stack to make it compatible for a serverless architecture. The entire solution was built on a completely serverless architecture, leveraging AWS Lamda, without spinning one server.
Minfy used a heterogeneous migration to Aurora using Data Migration Service. Using DMS-Data Migration Service of AWS, about 2.9 crore user data was migrated on AWS from MySQL to Aurora –MySQL. The data was stored in Single Table, giving another challenge to put scalability on the Read Endpoint. AWS- DMS- Data Migration Service was used to migrate data from Dev environment MySQL to Aurora Dynamo DB. AWS Database Migration Service supports homogenous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, as well as heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms, such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon Aurora. With AWS Database Migration Service, NRC could replicate data with high availability and consolidate databases into a petabyte-scale data warehouse. Since the data in the database is encrypted with KMS, snapshots are created to transfer the data from source endpoint to read endpoint.
If NRC has to go for an on-premise solution for their requirement, the feasibility of setting up such a massive infra is a million dollar question; they should have spent at least a 1000x of CapEx for conducting the e-verification drive successfully. Hence, the solution provided by Minfy has helped to set up the required infrastructure on AWS cloud within a couple of days with minimal CapEx investment, the serverless approach has resulted in minimal spend, 30 times lesser than that of a monolithic architecture, yet achieving a hassle free user experience during the verification drive. The deployed solution covers optimised serverless solution, which was provided with help of AWS Lambda with Auto scale and Aurora for scalability, ease in migration of data of crores citizens using AWS Data Migration Services seamlessly. With he scalable solution, the entire state population was able to do the e-verification using the portal in the stipulated period of time.
good luck in your job.
Good post but I was wondering if you could write a litte more on this subject? I’d be very thankful if you could elaborate a little bit further. Appreciate it!