In 2012, RoZetta Technology started evaluating service providers that could run a dynamic compute load at low cost and meet strict security, data sovereignty, and performance criteria. Atkinson says, “At the time of evaluation, there were only a small number of cloud services providers available in Australia. We did consider an alternative provider, but they could not match the elasticity or range of services provided by Amazon Web Services, and there were up front commitments required to utilize their cloud infrastructure.”

RoZetta Technology’s research revealed that AWS could meet its requirements. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) could enable the business to run customer environments in isolated sections of the AWS cloud and take advantage of features such as security groups and network access control lists. The presence of AWS data centers in Europe and the United States eased the concerns of one multinational client over data sovereignty, and the launch of an AWS data center in Australia in late 2012 solved the problem completely. After conducting several POCs to determine if the business would experience better price/performance in AWS, AWS proved it could consistently provide the performance needed to meet customer requirements.

AWS provides the elasticity to support demand peaks for client services and enables the business to pay only for the infrastructure resources it needed. In addition, the cloud service could easily scale to support rising transaction volumes and demand for RoZetta Technology services.

RoZetta Technology started deploying its first client project in AWS in late 2013 and is now running client projects in separate Amazon VPCs. These projects include a service that extracts company announcements from the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in PDF form, undertakes optical character recognition, and delivers this information to Dow Jones for use in its Factiva information platform.

RoZetta Technology uses AWS CloudFormation to create templates for client environments that incorporate core AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for compute resources, Amazon S3 for data storage, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for message queueing, Amazon DynamoDB for NoSQL database scalability and performance, and Amazon CloudSearch for search.

AWS has provided RoZetta Technology with sales support in addition to technical support. Technical experts have reviewed and ratified the AWS architectures created by RoZetta Technology’s internal development teams, while AWS sales teams have helped explain to prospective RoZetta Technology clients the value of financial-data-management solutions running in a public cloud. RoZetta Technology is an extensive user of AWS architecture training programs to help its IT team members understand core AWS technologies. Meanwhile, the stability of AWS technologies has meant that AWS Support has acted as an insurance policy for RoZetta Technology, with queries to date limited to minor engineering questions.

The figure below illustrates RoZetta Technology's environment in AWS.