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Case Study

How Factual Minds Helped TargetBay Achieve Scalable Microservices on Amazon ECS (EC2)

Challenges

  • Monolithic Single Node TargetBay’s NGINX + PHP-FPM-based APIs ran entirely on a single c5.2xlarge EC2 instance, along with background and batch jobs.
  • Resource Contention Spikes in traffic frequently triggered OOM (Out of Memory) events, causing service crashes and frontend downtime.
  • Limited Scalability & Fault Tolerance Vertical scaling led to service downtime.
  • No redundancy—if the instance failed, all services went offline.
  • Slow Deployment Cycle Releasing updates posed a risk to live traffic, with no safe deployment strategy in place.

Solution Provided by Factual Minds

Factual Minds designed and implemented a modern, containerized architecture using Amazon ECS on EC2, introducing fault isolation, auto-scaling, and path-based routing for service-level flexibility.
Microservices Decomposition
  • Converted each component (e.g., public-api, jobs-processor, admin-api) into Dockerized microservices.
  • Each service managed independently within ECS, enabling fine-grained scaling and deployments.
ECS on EC2 with Auto Scaling
  • Created an ECS Cluster backed by an Auto Scaling Group of EC2 instances (e.g., c5.large).
  • Enabled Spot + On-Demand instance mix to optimize compute spend.
  • Attached an ECS Capacity Provider to dynamically scale container hosts as demand increased.
Load Balancing & Routing

Implemented an Application Load Balancer (ALB):

  • /api/v1/* → public-api
  • /jobs/* → jobs-processor
  • Configured health checks for zero-downtime deployments.
API Gateway Integration
Added Amazon API Gateway (HTTP API) for:
  • Throttling: 100 RPS with burst control.
  • Authentication: IAM token validation.
  • WAF integration for additional security.
Monitoring & Auto Scaling
  • ECS Service Auto Scaling: Configured per-service policies (scale at >60% CPU).
  • CloudWatch Dashboards: Tracked CPU, memory, request latency, and error rates.
  • Centralized logging enabled faster troubleshooting and alerting.

Results & Benefits

AWS Services Used

  • Amazon ECS (EC2 Launch Type) – Container orchestration with full control over compute layer
  • Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Group – Host-level scaling tied to ECS demand
  • ECS Capacity Providers – Dynamic container host provisioning
  • Application Load Balancer (ALB) – Path-based traffic routing and container health checks
  • Amazon API Gateway (HTTP API) – Request throttling, authentication, and edge security
  • Amazon CloudWatch – Real-time metrics, dashboards, and alerts
  • AWS IAM – Secure, role-based access control

Why Choose Factual Minds?

  • As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Factual Minds brings deep expertise in containerization and cloud-native modernization. Our ECS-based migration helped TargetBay transition from a fragile monolith to a resilient, cost-efficient, microservices architecture—laying the foundation for sustainable growth.

Get Started Today

Looking to enhance your development team’s efficiency with Amazon Q? Contact Factual Minds today for expert guidance and seamless implementation!
Client Overview

TargetBay is a marketing automation SaaS provider powering dynamic email and SMS campaigns. Their core platform serves thousands of e-commerce merchants via a suite of RESTful APIs. Initially deployed on a single Amazon EC2 instance, the platform handled web traffic, API calls, batch processing, and scheduled jobs—all from a centralized node.

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