How TASK TOWER uses ELASTIC BEANSTALK to make the EMAIL MANAGEMENT process skyrocket

About

Task Tower is a great tool for managing emails of employees within the company, creating tasks, handling projects, along with the unified calendar, sticky notes, directory, and many more features. These features enhance experiences for users and managers to communicate seamlessly. Task Tower is a communication platform programmed in .NET and Angular. It facilitates communication between internal system users and external emails addresses.

The Challenge

When Task Tower was implemented, we needed to meet significant compute needs cost-effectively.

We faced the challenge of automating the mail detecting system and cost factor which would have been too high if the database had to be set up. Another choice was to choose one email platform. A platform where we could share calendars and where there is a guarantee of security, stability, and performance. However, the process of managing the infrastructure required for the deployment of the application is pretty tedious. It becomes a stressful job for the IT department to manage the storage, especially Emails and operating system.

Approach

We came to the conclusion that the cloud was the best way to meet the needs for cost savings, scalability, and email automation and decided to use Amazon Web Services (AWS). After exploring all AWS services, one of those services was AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which is used to deploy and scale web applications.

However, AWS offers Elastic Beanstalk which provides a platform for those who want to deploy their code without any hassle. Beanstalk provides a lot of flexibility to the users by charging them according to their usage.

To use this service, developers just need to upload the code and AWS Beanstalk will take care of the rest. Elastic Beanstalk handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, application health monitoring to load balancing.

Solution

We have set up an Email Processing service in Elastic Beanstalk of AWS. AWS S3 takes care of the mails which arrive in S3 Bucket. Email gets stored in Database after being processed.

We configured the Zimbra mail server on AWS EC2 instance. All the incoming mails from end-user first pass through SPAM_TITAN SERVICE which is a software solution that blocks spam, viruses, malware, ransomware, phishing attempts, and other email threats.

As the Incoming mail arrives in Zimbra mail server, it runs the scripts in crontab utility which moves the mail to s3 bucket. As soon as mail arrives in S3 Bucket from Zimbra server, it triggers the Lambda Function which then calls the web service in Elastic Beanstalk for the response (fig). Thus, using Elastic Beanstalk, we automate the process by attaching the S3 bucket along with Zimbra Email Service, with the help of Lambda Function.

Now, AWS Beanstalk helps us to automate the whole process of managing the application. We can retain full control over AWS resources powering our applications and can access the resources at any time.

Conclusion

Our goal was to meet the requirements of automating Email Management without spending significant amounts. Once we migrated to AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Lambda, there would be a greater impact on our business as productivity increases and cost decreases.

Beanstalk helps us to save the stress of handling data cost-effectively.