AWS ECS-Based Modernization of Camp Management Platform for iCampPro
Modernizing a seasonal camp management platform with auto-scaling services, decoupled background processing, and faster releases.
iCampPro’s camp management and customer engagement platform faced seasonal load strain, manual deployments, and background workloads competing with user-facing services. KnackForge modernized the platform using Amazon ECS (Fargate) for web and worker services, decoupled asynchronous processing with Amazon SQS, and improved performance and operability using Aurora PostgreSQL, Redis caching, and CloudFront-backed static delivery.
Challenges
- No standardized CI/CD pipeline across staging and production, leading to slow, error-prone deployments.
- Backend workloads could not auto-scale effectively during seasonal traffic surges.
- Background processing impacted frontend responsiveness due to resource contention.
- Higher legacy infrastructure costs with limited visibility and right-sizing control.
- Infrastructure lacked isolation between services and granular access controls or audit trails.
- Needed to decouple background services using SQS-driven ECS tasks for asynchronous processing.
The Solution
- Deployed web application services on Amazon ECS (Fargate) behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) with routing via Amazon Route 53.
- Offloaded background jobs (alerts, invoice generation, notifications) using Amazon SQS and separate ECS worker services.
- Implemented Amazon Aurora (PostgreSQL-compatible) as the primary relational database with multi-AZ high availability.
- Integrated Amazon ElastiCache (Redis) for session and cache management to reduce latency under load.
- Delivered static assets using Amazon S3 with Amazon CloudFront for faster global access.
The Impact
With KnackForge Cloud Services in place, the customer experienced:
- Release time reduced from ~40 minutes to ~10 minutes (75% faster).
- Frontend response time improved by ~35% by isolating background workloads into SQS-driven ECS tasks.
- Deployment uptime improved from ~97% to 100% with a zero-downtime rollout.
- Stable performance during simulated peaks at 2x baseline load through ECS scaling and queue buffering.
- New environment setup reduced from several hours to ~20 minutes using Terraform-based provisioning.
- TCO analysis estimated 20% to 25% monthly cost reduction through right-sized Fargate tasks and reduced infrastructure overhead.
Technologies Used:
- Amazon ECS (AWS Fargate)
- Amazon Aurora (PostgreSQL-compatible)
- Amazon SQS
- Amazon ElastiCache (Redis)
- Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront
- Application Load Balancer (ALB) with Amazon Route 53