AWS migration lowers total cost of ownership for automotive manufacturer
The challenge
The manufacturer needed to vacate a US data centre as part of a facility move.
The data centre hosted a business-critical online vehicle-configuration service comprising 80–90 sub-applications.
Many applications used legacy technology, including unsupported JBoss versions, and had accumulated substantial technical debt.
But moving the service—and the infrastructure required to support it—to a new data center required a massive capital investment in licensing fees and hardware. They needed a solution they could afford—one that could also set them up for future application modernization.
The solution
Beyondsoft proposed migrating the vehicle-configuration service to AWS instead of moving it to another data centre.
The approach would reduce licensing and hardware costs while improving availability, flexibility and scalability.
It would also create a foundation for future application refactoring and continued cloud innovation.
Beyondsoft practitioners used AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to create multiple environments including development, testing, staging, and production. To enable high availability and load balancing, these environments were distributed across two regions.
The architecture uses AWS services for specific functions:
- CloudFront: Content delivery.
- EC2: Application and web layers.
- S3: Log storage.
- Glacier: Long-term storage for logs older than 90 days.
- CloudWatch: Instance monitoring and alerts.
- EFS: Application and web content and logs.
Finally, because the service must still connect to other on-premise services, AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated network connection to the Phoenix data center. Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides permissions management to ensure secure access to all their resources in the cloud.
Results
Thanks to the AWS migration, our customer has reaped multiple benefits. They’ve also positioned themselves to refactor their vehicle configuration service in the future to leverage the full capabilities of AWS.
- Reduced migration costs: By not migrating to another physical data center, the money they saved in licensing fees and hardware costs paid for their migration to AWS.
- Lower total cost of ownership: The cost of maintaining the AWS environment is lower than the cost to support the on-premise infrastructure.
- Easier to support: Because AWS manages the hardware and system, the company can focus on simply managing the data, saving time, money, and resources. Additionally, the solution leverages a fully managed database service, reducing the strain on existing staff.
- High availability architecture: The use of multiple availability zones minimizes downtime when issues arise.
- Increased flexibility and agility: Thanks to the dynamic cloud infrastructure, applications can be scaled vertically.
Technologies used
AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), AWS Direct Connect, Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Our experience
Beyondsoft has performed hundreds of data and application migrations for large enterprise customers. Our certified practitioners have hands-on, best-practice knowledge of all the major platforms. As an AWS Data Migration Competency Partner, Beyondsoft has invested in building deep proficiency on the AWS platform.