Ep 104 – Get ready for re:Invent with AWS (Jillian Forde)

When both data centers in Sudan lost power during the civil war in February 2024, Totogi migrated 23 million subscribers to its cloud-based charging system in just 18 days. This was possible because Totogi’s Charging-as-a-Service solution is built entirely on AWS infrastructure. The team worked around the clock using global resources and partnered closely with AWS to handle the massive scaling requirements. Traditional vendors would have needed six to twelve months for such a migration, but Totogi’s AWS-first architecture enabled this record-breaking deployment that literally restored connectivity to millions of people. Read the full case study on Totogi’s work with Zain Sudan.

Totogi’s Charging-as-a-Service is a cloud-native solution that replaces traditional on-premise charging systems used by telecom operators. The charging system determines how much to bill customers for calls, texts, and data usage—particularly important in prepaid markets where it functions like an ATM in the sky. Built exclusively on AWS services like DynamoDB and Lambda, Totogi’s solution can scale instantly to handle massive transaction volumes while only charging customers for actual usage, making it ideal for business continuity and disaster recovery scenarios. You can buy Totogi’s Charging-as-a-Service on the AWS Marketplace starting at $0.01 per month.

DR and the Totogi team made a strategic decision to go all-in on AWS rather than building a multi-cloud or cloud-agnostic solution. Their philosophy of “WWAWSD” (What Would AWS Do?) guides architecture decisions, using native services like DynamoDB instead of generic databases and Lambda instead of Kubernetes. This approach allows Totogi to ride AWS’s innovation wave, benefiting automatically from improvements in regions, chips, and services. The result is a product that continuously gets cheaper and better without additional development effort, while being optimized for AWS’s battle-tested infrastructure.

Traditional disaster recovery requires telcos to maintain duplicate on-premise infrastructure that sits mostly unused, requiring constant maintenance, patching, and testing—yet often doesn’t work when actually needed. With Totogi’s cloud-based solution, customers pay only when they actually use the disaster recovery system, making it essentially free until needed. When Zain Sudan’s data centers went down, it simply activated Totogi’s cloud system and it worked immediately. Learn more about how Totogi’s Charging-as-a-Service can help you eliminate your charger’s unused disaster recovery setup to quickly failover when you need it, paying only for what you use.

DR advises regulated industries to start with disaster recovery and business continuity workloads as an entry point to public cloud adoption. Since these systems sit unused most of the time, they’re lower risk but still business-critical—perfect for demonstrating cloud capabilities. Once companies experience successfully failing over to cloud during an incident and maintaining operations seamlessly, the case for moving other workloads becomes compelling. DR emphasizes that hyperscalers like AWS won’t steal industry data because doing so would destroy their entire business model. Hear more about this remarkable work in episode 95 with Ali Hussein Kassim.

According to DR, if companies aren’t already in the cloud, generative AI makes the move essential. The public cloud provides access to multiple foundational models, secure data handling that doesn’t feed training models, rapid experimentation capabilities, and customized AI chips like Inferentia and Trainium. DR believes generative AI represents the biggest change to work in our lifetime, and first movers in regulated industries who aggressively adopt both the public cloud and generative AI will gain significant competitive advantages while others move slowly and watch their competitors. Listen to the complete discussion on The Official AWS Podcast.