graylink Speeds Up Job Recruiting in Africa Using AWS

A Cure for Inflexibility

Historically, the company delivered its recruitment software as a service solutions via on-premises platforms, but this lacked flexibility so graylink planned to migrate to Microsoft Azure. However, a member of the devops team proposed Amazon Web Services (AWS), so the firm ran parallel proofs of concept, and AWS outperformed Azure. What’s more, the company saw that the AWS SDK for .NET helped it to integrate Microsoft .NET applications with the AWS Cloud. Mark Gray, graylink’s CEO, says, “Using AWS, page-loading times were three times faster than with Azure. Plus, we gained access to many more platform services to help us drive innovation.”

Greater Performance, Lower Cost

Over a weekend, graylink switched its production systems to AWS. “We had fantastic technical support from AWS in Luxembourg,” says Gray. graylink now uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with AWS Auto Scaling so it no longer needs to capacity plan. As critical storage, it uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which enables it to send data to Amazon Elasticsearch Service, which indexes job and candidate data for rapid searching.

Gray says, “Using AWS, we can migrate from our traditional Microsoft applications such as SQL Server. We see much better results when we search large data sets in Elasticsearch.”

Delivering Agility, Confidence

graylink can quickly scale its IT to meet traffic spikes. “When a customer launches a big recruitment campaign, we ramp up our AWS infrastructure to handle the potentially 100,000s of applications that come in, and scale down after this initial rush,” says Gray. He adds that AWS gives graylink customers increased confidence because its security features protect sensitive data.

Learn More

Visit: AWS graylink case study