Advanced: Leveraging DevOps to accelerate Cloud migration

Advanced was looking to strengthen their in-house DevOps skillset, as well as gain developmental and operational freedom by migrating their infrastructure from Rackspace to self-managed AWS hosting.

BUSINESS NEED

Advanced acquired Science Warehouse, providers of Spend Management solution Cloud Marketplace in March 2018, who had an AWS Cloud-hosted infrastructure, managed by a third-party Cloud management provider.

Having this model of infrastructure management was expensive and didn’t allow them to have the kind of influence and control they were looking for. As part of the integration of the Science

Warehouse business into Advanced it was decided to take responsibility for their own system and its applications, whilst encouraging their in-house teams to develop their DevOps competences.

A self-managed AWS hosting model allowed them to move away from their third-party’s database engine Oracle to Postgres, providing significant benefits and cost efficiencies.

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PROJECT DETAILS

Advanced started with a ”Lift & Shift” migration from their Rackspace infrastructure to platform AWS, including the database engine change from Oracle to Postgres.

An Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, Terraform, allowed the team to define automated infrastructure for easier reconstruction of what had previously been done. This gave Advanced more control over what they hosted on AWS and ensured consistency, with everything defined in a single location.

Next, to enable a clear definition of the infrastructure’s life cycle, the DevOps team divided the infrastructure management into layers, helping to clarify which parts of it are responsible for the

database, the application, networking, etc.

For the database migration, a Postgres skeleton was developed alongside the corresponding infrastructure, the latter built using the AWS Database Migration Service. The final database was created using AWS Aurora to ensure high performance and availability.

Once this was done, Advanced had to adapt their existing applications to use Postgres. Although a significant development effort, as the two database engines are not compatible, the effort enabled Advanced to move forward with new benefits, including greater cost efficiency.

— Costs saved - switching the database engine meant Advanced

could better control on-going product and maintenance costs,

realising efficiencies.

— Future innovation – migrating to AWS has given Advanced

more control and the ability to easily develop the infrastructure

further in the future.

— Development speed – as the infrastructure, deployment,

and testing is now automated, development can be greatly

accelerated.

— Higher quality – enhanced monitoring, performance insights,

and log analytics allow for faster resolution times when issues

are found.

— Accelerated migration – thanks to a carefully tailored “Lift

& Shift” migration model, Advanced was able to meet their

transformation objectives sooner than they had anticipated.

— Faster time-to-market – moving to an in-house DevOps

approach allows for faster feature releases.

— Increased in-house competences – the DevOps teams are

able to work together seamlessly, learning from each other

and enhancing their skillset.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT OUR SERVICES: PLEASE CALL US AT +44 (0) 770 353 6786 OR VISIT OUR WEBSITE WWW.PGS-SOFT.COM

BUSINESS BENEFITS

Being able to build a brand-new, Cloud-hosted infrastructure from scratch allowed the teams to put their DevOps competencies to use

throughout the entire process – which was an important objective for Advanced – as well as gain a number of crucial benefits:

TECHNICAL DETAILS

SOLUTIONSAWS Cloud, Layered Architecture Management, Network Peering

TECHNOLOGIESAWS Aurora, AWS DMS, AWS Cluster, AWS Code Deploy, AWS ALB, AWS EC2, AWS Lambda, AWS SNS, AWS SQS, AWS SES, AWS VPC

TOOLSTerraform, Jenkins, Harness, ELK (Kibana)

TEAM1 DevOps Engineer, 1 Java/DevOps Engineer

ABOUT PGS SOFTWARE

PGS Software is one of the largest public listed custom software & services providers in Poland. As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner,

we specialise in Cloud projects – consulting, cloud-native development, application modernisation, & migration. Working according to agile

methodologies (Scrum, DevOps, & Continuous Delivery), we create mobile & web applications as well as provide Business Analysis, Visual

Design, UX, UI, & QA services to clients worldwide. We have development & business entities in Poland, UK, Germany, & Spain.

ABOUT ADVANCED

Advanced is the third largest British software and services company in the UK. We help organisations create the right digital foundations

that drive productivity, insight and innovation.

Our customers achieve increased efficiencies, savings and growth with right-first-time software. Our solutions, both commercial and public

sector, simplify business challenges and deliver immediate value, positively impacting millions of people’s lives.

www.oneadvanced.com