Many of the enterprise clients we work with are looking at Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support their cloud strategies and reap the benefits of the public cloud: lower costs, higher scalability, greater availability of computing resources.
AWS is well known for its cutting edge service offerings, which are always growing and evolving—making them an easy choice to recommend to our enterprise clients. When used to provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS), it simplifies hardware provisioning and management and makes it easy to allocate compute, memory and storage capacity. In a platform as a service (PaaS) situation, it can streamline operations through automated backups and patching, and can offer the convenience of pay-as-you-go billing.
The challenge for many organizations migrating to the cloud comes when they start to move their enterprise applications. That’s because these applications often rely on highly customized infrastructure with tightly coupled components. They also tend to exist in silos. Some careful planning is needed to make sure the new cloud environment delivers the outperforms the legacy on-premises one in terms of scalability, reliability and performance. Whenever desired by the customer, we will often recommend and apply a number of optimizations during the migration process, such as decoupling of components, stability and performance tune-ups as well as improved operational visibility and platform automation.
When we migrated Harvard Business Publishing to AWS, for example, we tailored the public cloud architecture to meet their specific needs. (Harvard Business Publishing is a subsidiary of Harvard University — based in Boston, with offices in New York City, India, Singapore, Qatar and the United Kingdom. They produce and distribute content across multiple platforms.)
Harvard Business Publishing was running Oracle applications in a data center on three Oracle Database Appliances. With the data center lease coming up for renewal, they asked us to help migrate their Oracle-based production, quality assurance and disaster recovery systems to an AWS cloud. Obviously, these systems were mission critical.
We did thorough capacity planning and developed a reliable, highly-automated and predictable migration approach up front, customized the AWS architecture, and migrated to a large number of virtual machines and Oracle schemas.
In another instance, we migrated CityRealty’s core applications to the cloud from on-premise hardware running Oracle databases. CityRealty is the oldest continuously operating real estate website in New York City — the world’s largest real estate market — and remains the city’s leading site today. We proposed moving three production databases to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which provides highly scalable compute capacity, as well as upgrading the Oracle databases. We also built a highly efficient standby and recovery solution using Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) snapshots.
In both of these cases, we did the planning up front to ensure the new cloud environment would be ready to receive the clients’ applications and run them without any compromise in performance. We’ve done similar migrations for clients operating e-commerce businesses with revenues of millions and even billions per year. Every situation is a little different: in some cases clients needed to simplify and standardize their mission-critical systems; in others, boost reliability; in others, increase automation or eliminate transaction-hampering latency.
We have the benefit of small, dedicated cloud teams around the world with multiple, advanced AWS certifications to address even the most complex requirements. Our goal always is to ensure the public cloud architecture is ideally suited to the enterprise, and to provide detailed implementation plans and data management solutions for optimal performance. That allows us to implement and manage public, private, and hybrid environments with lower risk and cost for organizations that want to seize the benefits of the cloud.
Find out how Pythian can help you with cloud solutions for AWS today.
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Excellent article.