Migration to Amazon Web Services
Our client was (and still continues to be) a business providing SaaS based sports tipping solution for their customers.
Historically, their systems were hosted on physical servers co-located in a shared data centre where the costs were determined by how much rack space was used. Physical access was limited, and infrastructure was managed using a combination of Windows Remote Desktop services and the Dell Remote Access Controller (DRAC) cards as a fail-safe.
In 2013 after over 10 years running of servers in the data centre, the physical infrastructure came to end of life and IRQ was engaged to assist in migrating the platform to the cloud.
The first activity to do was to select a cloud service provider. An evaluation of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure was completed to determine which would be best suited to meet the requirements for the platform. A review of both offerings was conducted, and it was determined that either could meet the requirements, but that AWS was the more mature (at that time). The recommendation to proceed with AWS was accepted by the client.
With time constraints in mind, the initial approach was for a “lift-and-drop” into AWS. This involved replicating the existing physical environment in the cloud, with a one for one migration for each physical server to a new virtual instance. Configuration modifications were deliberately kept to a minimum with no significant changes to architecture and operating systems and databases kept on the same versions. This enabled the service to be rapidly re-platformed in the cloud and avoid any extension to leases in the data centre.
The solution encompasses the following AWS services:
EC2 - for both Windows and Linux instances
EBS Snapshots - for regular backups
Load Balancers
Security Groups
IAM – including use of Multi-Factor Authentication
S3 – for storage of shared files and synchronisation between instances, including use of versioning and lifecycle management
SNS – for notifications and monitoring
VPC – with multiple subnets
Route 53 – for all hosted zones
SES – for reliable delivery of outbound email
There are also separate segregated environments for Production, Test and Development.
Commencing in late 2019, we were engaged to design and deliver an upgrade to the platform. This involved optimising and rationalising the number of instances, re-architecting for resilience with multiple availability zones, upgrades to the latest supported Windows operating system and SQL Server database versions, and deployment of additional AWS services including Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Simple Email Service (SES). The new platform went live in February 2020 and now services over 20,000 users.
