AWS 3 Tire Web Application Architecture

Overview

This document outlines the technical architecture of a modern web application. The architecture is designed to ensure high availability, scalability, and security, addressing common challenges in web application deployment.

Architecture Components

1. Authentication

• SSO Service: The Single Sign-On (SSO) service is responsible for user authentication across different parts of the application, ensuring a seamless user experience and improved security.

2. Web Servers

• CDN (Content Delivery Network): The CDN is used to distribute the static content of the website to various geographic locations, reducing latency and improving load times for users.
• WAF (Web Application Firewall): The WAF protects the web servers from common web exploits and vulnerabilities, ensuring the security of data transactions.
• Load Balancer: The load balancer distributes incoming network traffic across multiple web servers to ensure reliability and high availability. It improves the distribution of workloads across servers and increases the application’s responsiveness.

3. Application Servers

• App Server 1 & 2: These servers handle the application logic and process user interactions after the initial connection has been established through the web servers. They are crucial for dynamic content management and execution of backend processes.
• App Load Balancer: Similar to the web server load balancer, this component distributes traffic between the application servers to optimize resource use and maximize throughput.

4. Storage

• RDS Instance (Relational Database Service): This managed database service is used for storing, retrieving, and managing relational data securely and efficiently.
• S3 Bucket: This component is used for scalable storage in the cloud. It is designed to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web.

Data Flow

1. User Authentication: Users initiate the process by authenticating through the SSO service, which manages credentials and session tokens securely.
2. Content Delivery and Security: Upon authentication, users are directed through the CDN for static content and the WAF for security filtering before reaching the web servers.
3. Load Balancing: Both web and application traffic are managed by respective load balancers, ensuring that requests are evenly distributed to prevent overload and to manage failover effectively.
4. Dynamic Content Processing: Application servers process dynamic content requests, interacting with the database and storage services to fetch or store data.
5. Data Storage and Retrieval: The RDS instance handles structured data, while the S3 bucket is used for unstructured data like multimedia files or large datasets.

Security Features

• SSO Integration: Enhances security by centralizing user authentication and session management.
• WAF Deployment: Protects against common web threats and DDoS attacks, ensuring data integrity and availability.
• Encrypted Data Storage: Ensures that both RDS and S3 Bucket store data securely using encryption at rest and in transit.

Scalability and Reliability

• Load Balancers: Improve the reliability of the system by preventing any single point of failure and scaling resources as per demand.
• CDN Usage: Enhances global reach and reduces the load on origin servers, effectively scaling to handle large volumes of traffic.
• Managed Services: Utilizing managed services like RDS and S3 reduces operational overhead and scales automatically based on application needs.

Conclusion

The described web application architecture provides a robust framework for deploying scalable, secure, and highly available online applications. It leverages modern technologies and services to meet the growing demands of digital services and user expectations.