How is Simon built?


This page explains the architecture of Simon at a high level.


Simon is a multi-tenant Software as a Service (Saas) application written using Cake PHP and sits on the application server (AWS EC2).


Our application infrastructure diagram is available on request.






How is Simon hosted?


The Simon infrastructure is securely hosted in the cloud in Amazon's AWS (Amazon Web Services) Australia (AU) data centres.

Our application server runs Amazon Linus AMI a stable, secure and high-performance environment for applications running on Amazon EC2.

To ensure fast, reliable and secure deployment we utilise BitBucket to develop and deploy various components of our application.


Is Simon scanned for viruses and other threats?


Absolutely! The virus scanner, Symantec Cloud Workload Protection, monitors real-time vulnerabilities to the platform.  Symantec Cloud Workload Protect for Storage is responsible for ensuring files uploaded to Simon are virus and malware free.  This ensure that if you download documents from Simon they are free from virus and malware.


Services, Gateways and Third Party Providers


Simon utilises a number of Services, Gateways and Third Party Providers to support aspects of the Simon platform as outlined below:


Database Server

The Database server is an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

It is configured across the Australian availability zone inside the Sydney region.

Simon is a multi-tenant application with one instance and database shared amongst tenants. Each tenant is segregated by a unique organisation ID in the database.


Email

We use the Apache PHP installed on the application server to send email from the system . The email service is responsible for delivering email messages, such as candidate offers, new users, etc.


SMS

The SMS Gateway is responsible for delivery SMS messages, such as candidate offer an acceptance.  Our SMS Gateway is provided by BurstSMS


Third Party Providers

There are also a number of Third Party providers, that Simon uses as services for the application:


  • Google Maps API
  • LinkedIn Developers Plugins



Monitoring & Server Status

Simon infrastructure is monitored using Symantec Cloud Workload Protection & Cloud Workload Protection for Storage which ensures availability of the application