Serverless From Day One: DingDingNow

Birth of a Business in the Age of Pandemic

DingDingNow is an early-stage start-up that was founded during the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 when typical ways of networking such as in-person meetups or career fairs were negatively affected because of social distancing. DingDingNow is targeting the learner and mentor communities to bring them together and have them share learnings and experiences in a real-time fashion. The core values of the company are innovation, collaboration, inclusion, and compassion.

DingDingNow has needed a very fast time to market and was not in a position to create the interactive experience from scratch. The company also needed to establish a creative and interactive meeting structure and they preferred to choose a low-cost method, so they have decided to establish their business through Amazon Chime SDK, to achieve these goals and make a low-cost choice.

Global Market Reach in Months

The company needed a video meeting infrastructure that they could white-label, and AWS provides the least costly and well-structured solution for the company. DingDingNow, as a startup, wanted to take advantage of Amazon's credit support to startups. Along with the cost perspective, AWS provides scalability from day one, and this is a significant benefit for the company to provide high-demand services to their users in near future.

Why Sufle?

Sufle’s enthusiasm about experimenting with new services, and giving back the know-how to the open-source community-led Sufle to be one of the first teams to try out the newly released Amazon Chime SDK with Lambda and to write the experiences through an article series on Sufle blog.

Right after the release, the article caught the attention of the community, immediately. DingDingNow came through the article as they were looking for a partner with such capabilities. As an official Well-Architected Partner of AWS Partner Network, Sufle had the know-how on the Amazon Chime SDK, so it was capable of being a guide for DingDingNow company in this regard. Sufle’s expert software development team is also knowledgeable in Lambda and serverless design practices, which enabled them to easily analyze, optimize and satisfy DingDingNow’s needs. In addition to all these, as a partner in modern application development, Sufle has high knowledge and experiments with Amazon Chime SDK and Lambda to show what they can achieve more and why uniquely qualified.

Serverless Interactive Video Solution

Sufle designed DingDingNow’s meeting application’s architecture fully serverless on Lambda with API Gateway endpoints and static site on S3 and Cloudfront. Amazon EventBridge with Lambda consumer is also used for subscribing and processing Amazon Chime SDK’s events. The Serverless Application Model is used on local development environments and deployment pipelines for resource provisioning and deployments, enabling infrastructure to be stored as code. Amazon CloudWatch Logs is used for log management and Lambda Insights is utilized to optimize functions even more.

Results and Benefits

The serverless approach enabled DingDingNow’s platform to be always available regardless of the demand. Also due to both free tier limits and the cost of serverless components, the cost is kept at the absolute minimum.

Without Serverless Computing support of Amazon Web Services, DingDingNow would have to provision EC2 instances or containers, operate them, and pay for the unutilized resources.

Sufle's design of AWS Serverless solutions reduced time to market and made it easy to deploy new features to enhance the platform now and in the future.

Sufle designed and implemented a new cloud infrastructure of DingDingNow with the following AWS Well-Architected Principals. Working together with Sufle, DingDingNow only focuses on business development and expanding their startup without worrying about infrastructure security, scalability, reliability, performance, and cost.

Trying to launch your startup without concerns about scaling or costs? Book an Appointment to learn more about how serverless can leverage your business in many directions.