atmail Public Clouds: AWS-based and Multi-AZ
While we’ve been helping our telco customers on their digital transformation journeys, behind the scenes we’ve been going on one of our own. Ever since 1998 when we released one of the very first commercial webmail platforms (at the same time as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail), we’ve been adapting to the needs of the market and continuously improving our offering:
- In 2013, we offered our first cloud email services, built on IBM SoftLayer.
- In 2015, we improved our hosted email offering and moved to OpenStack.
- In 2018, we moved some of our hosted email services to AWS, with a private instance in ASEAN.
- In 2019, impressed with the stability, scalability and backend services of AWS, we followed suit in the US, moving our US-based email hosting to the AWS US East instance, multi-AZ (Availability Zones).
- Now, in 2021, we are pleased to announce today that we have opened our AWS EU-West instance (multi-AZ). New customers will be provisioned to the new platform. Existing customers on our EU cloud can opt to migrate. Please contact us if you have not received direct correspondence.
What’s so good about AWS?
In the words of our CEO, Dave Richards:
“As a company, we have committed to AWS for various reasons. Firstly, AWS does a lot of the heavy lifting for us outside of our core technical competencies. AWS gives us high availability database layers, network load balancers, autoscaling, service monitoring, and so on. In the past, we had to roll all of this on our own. In our OpenStack-based solutions, we had to: build and manage the MySQL Galera clusters; deploy, configure and maintain the HAProxys; and so on. With AWS, it’s just a simple click of the button and boom, there’s your HA Aurora DB. Understandably, there is a lot to love about that.
Secondly, one of the reasons we adopted AWS has been its credibility. In the past, when we walked into a room to talk about our cloud solutions, we would need to spend 30 minutes explaining what Openstack is and who our selected provider in that part of the world was. Today, that conversation takes 30 seconds. Question: “Who do you host your cloud on?”. Answer: “AWS.” Next question.
But thirdly, probably the biggest gain we’ve had from adopting the AWS ecosystem, has been the commercial pathways. Unlike OpenStack, AWS is a full-blown commercial environment as much as it is a set of tech tools. AWS is more than just an extension of Amazon’s online marketplace. AWS have pathways to your current and future customers. They are better aligned to businesses such as ours because they invest in sales teams and are compensated to help you to help your customers.”
Having said that, AWS is awesome, but keep your independence too.
What is multi-AZ?
An Availability Zone (AZ) is a high-availability offering that protects applications and data from data centre failures. Availability Zones are unique physical locations and each zone is made up of one or more data centres equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. Multi-AZ means that data is replicated across other data centres, so if one data centre fails, your valuable data is not lost or irretrievable.
What’s so good about multi-AZ?
The key benefits of a multi-AZ structure include:
- proven stability;
- increased availability;
- enhanced data durability;
- protection of service performance; and
- automatic failover across data centres.
In short, multi-AZ is more reliable, and if you need your email service to be as reliable as possible, multi-AZ is the way to go.
More technical details can be found the AWS site here.
Want to learn more?
To find out more about our AWS multi-AZ cloud offerings, we invite you to enquire here.
Moving your telco email to the cloud?
If you’re thinking of moving your telco email to the cloud, this free eBook from AWS might help you decide.
In this eBook you will learn:
- Why cloud email services boost scalability and speed to market;
- 5 ways that cloud email services improve security;
- 5 ways that cloud email services increase cost effectiveness; and
- Cloud email and collaboration revenue forecasts for 2020-2024.
New to atmail?
atmail is an email solutions company with 22 years of global, white label, email expertise. You can trust us to deliver an email platform that is secure, stable and scalable. We power more than 170 million mailboxes worldwide and offer modern, white-labelled, cloud hosted email with your choice of US or (GDPR compliant) EU data centres.
More Posts
