No matter the size of an organization, the digital environment needs to cater for future growth providing the flexibility to introduce the latest technology for scalability, reliability, security, efficiency, and industry-specific compliance. For one such organization, a worldwide conglomerate and trusted leading manufacturer across a variety of industries, its traditional legacy systems could no longer keep pace with demand.
Whereas once its legacy systems had worked perfectly well, rapid global business growth meant the company had outgrown its on-premises servers, data storage and infrastructure requirements. Also, having previously invested in a single IT vendor contract, they now experienced limitations on scaling resources on-demand and fault tolerance; the inability to deploy more advanced services as and when they became available meant the company was experiencing mishandling of on-demand traffic and increased risk of data corruption.
It was time to rethink its digital transformation goals for long-term future success.
Migrating from On-Prem to the Cloud
For this large enterprise, the in-house management of its applications in a datacenter was costly and resource-intensive. Due to the current database hosting location being physically inaccessible, their applications were subject to frequent application downtime leading to multiple issues in day-to-day business operations. Simply put, the data needed to be shifted to a location closer to most users, and existing applications to cloud-based file storage for centralized access around the world. A case of knowing what the end-goal needed to be, without the necessary skillset to get there.
Looking for a trusted cloud services provider, SourceFuse was engaged based on its collaborative approach and 16+ years’ experience of digital innovation and customer cloud migration success. As AWS Advanced Consulting Partners, SourceFuse adopts a modernization-led migration approach following the AWS Well Architected Framework Review, with extensive knowledge of migrating and modernizing workloads and applications to AWS Cloud.Â
Working closely with the enterprise’s team, a discovery-first approach identified the organization’s key challenges and priorities. These included:
- Setting up the infrastructure on AWS to support the new environment
- Ensuring optimal network latency
- Identifying the optimal geographic location for its datacenter
- Modernizing applications through containerization before hosting the desktop applications on AWS Cloud
- Utilizing container technology for running automated database migrations to maximize efficiency
Generally, applications that are hosted within containers provide both horizontal and vertical scaling as per their requirements, and application and network load balancers deliver faster request management.Â
As part of the modernization, incorporating Single Sign-On ensured the organization’s desktop applications used modern security mechanisms with improved reliability & security when communicating with application APIs. Further, AWS’s right-sizing of resources, reliable infrastructure, and hosting the database in multiple Availability Zones (AZ) guaranteed a more efficient system.
Right Technology, Right Place, Right Time
One of the major benefits to partnering with an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner is that they have access to over 200 AWS tools and services, and can help customers navigate the various funded programs that support the migration process. For this customer, SourceFuse incorporated:
- Amazon Elastic Container Registry – for Docker repository management
- Amazon Elastic Container Service – Fargate, to run serverless containers for the application layer of the solution
- Amazon Aurora – to manage PostgreSQL Cluster
- Amazon Cognito – for Single Sign-On
- Amazon S3 – for storage of binaries migrated out of SQL ServerÂ
- AWS Systems Manager – Parameter Store for application configuration
- AWS Auto Scaling – to provide resiliency under high transaction volumes
- Amazon CloudWatch – for monitoring and logging
- Amazon VPC – for hosting enterprise-grade applications and databases in a secure cloud
Additional third-party services deployed were:
- Terraform – for provisioning Infrastructure as Code
- Kong API Gateway – to provide an L7 API Gateway in front of gRPC APIs
Summary
In order to enable their customers with the best solutions, following cloud migration the conglomerate at the heart of this project now operates on a suite of desktop applications that consolidates all data, enabling access from its workstations worldwide. All database instances are synchronized across datacenters in the US, Europe, and Asia. The SourceFuse modernization-led migration approach achieved:
- Improved security and reliability via application containerization and being run over AWS ECS, thus allowing better management
- Reduced licensing and maintenance costs with the migration of data store for the gRPC microservice from SQL Server to Aurora PostgreSQL
- Elimination of single points of failure with multi-AZ infrastructure paired with auto-scaling
- Complete automation of infrastructure provisioning with end-to-end infrastructure creation in Terraform
