South Africa’s AI, Data Systems and IoT startup Aizatron is developing future-focused technology. The startup has developed an award-winning facial recognition application, and a facial recognition smart bell.
It is also able to iterate and pivot its products rapidly to meet its customer requirements. It also drives digital transformation for its customers and addresses their challenges quickly with technology.
As a result, Aizatron has snapped several industry awards for its solutions and service to the enterprise market.
The Cape Town-based startup services large enterprises, distributors, global consulting companies & other technology services firms.
Aizatron, founded three years ago, is powered by world-class technology.
To provide the best experience and meet demand, Aizatro uses the infrastructure of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest enterprise cloud computing hyperscaler.
In 2018, AWS established its first infrastructure on the African continent, launching Amazon CloudFront locations in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
Last year, AWS announced the general availability of AWS Outposts in South Africa.
AWS Outposts delivers fully managed, and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware that allow customers to run AWS compute, storage, database, and other services on-premises seamlessly connecting to AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud.
AWS allows Aizatron as a startup to maintain a highly responsive system and to be more strategic.
”Overall AWS has provided us with a powerful environment and tools to develop future focused technology”, says Ansu Sooful, CEO at Aizatron.
The startup uses technologies like AWS Greengrass to manage more complex edge devices, and better use their compute capacity.
“Using AWS IoT Greengrass, we can seamlessly extend AWS to edge devices so they can act locally on the data they generate, while still using the cloud for management, analytics, and durable storage,” Sooful explains.
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Furthermore, AWS Cloud Watch and Cloud Trail enable Aizatron to track and gain oversight of all its projects. This includes all the services it currently runs; keeping track of who is responsible for specific projects along with who created an API or commissioned a server and so forth. With AWS Budgets and Cost Explorer the company has visibility of how much services are costing, and AWS Trusted Advisor helps determine overall best practices.
Now Aizatron can compete with some of the most prominent players in the technology space globally.
Aizatron has adopted a serverless architecture model for most of its project implementations, resulting in significant cost savings and agility in their development process.
“As a startup, the ability to iterate and pivot our products rapidly is key to meeting customer requirements,” says Sooful.
“Using AWS allows us to scale infrastructure dynamically as required. We implemented serverless models where applicable, making maintenance near non-existent for these systems. This is ideal for us as it allows our team to focus on development and improving our offering while minimising our costs.”
Due to AWS providing massive supporting infrastructure and abstracting long and tedious operations processes, deployment time is drastically reduced.
AWS’ rich environment provides services that can be joined and leveraged to create complex and competitive systems in a fraction of the time compared to traditional server-based development methods.
“The cost to customers for our solutions is now lower because of the supporting APIs provided by AWS since we no longer have to build from the ground up,” says Sooful. “Our customers also benefit from faster response times because we can deploy systems to multiple locations for lower latency and higher resilience using AWS”.
When Aizatron strategically pivoted from its cloud server-based designs to serverless computing, this required skills development due to these technologies’ conceptual differences.
“Once we had a better understanding of what being serverless entailed, coupled to what could be achieved, it became easier to scale and maintain our applications. Tools like Amplify CLI and SAM CLI have been beneficial allowing for rapid iteration and quick deployment,” he adds.
Sooful says going serverless allowed them to only pay for what they use, resulting in significant cost reduction during development.
“This, coupled with the rich feature set available from AWS, allows for a large amount of flexibility in making custom utilities needed by our clients achievable in relatively short periods. AWS also makes implementing security much simpler with its array of supported authentication methods and comprehensive security services. This flexibility makes the reusing functionality much simpler.”
Although Aizatron is already utilising several features, Sooful says they want to make all their architecture serverless and have adopted AWS Serverless Application Model and the AWS Cloud Development Kit, Cloud Formation, and Terraform.
“These have streamlined our dev-ops process’s, preventing us spending hours on manual deployment,” he adds.
“Having a single platform which allows us to develop complex, multifaceted systems in a serverless manner is ideal for us as a startup. We are also using technologies like AWS Greengrass to manage more complex edge devices, and better use of their compute capacity,” says Sooful.
“Using AWS IoT Greengrass, we can seamlessly extend AWS to edge devices so they can act locally on the data they generate, while still using the cloud for management, analytics, and durable storage. Overall, AWS has provided us with a powerful environment and tools to develop future-focused technology.”
