The Client is a Fortune 1000 networking technology company with cutting edge products for high-performance networks and an equipment supplier for Internet and Telecom Service Providers. The company has grown significantly in the past 10 years and has been championing SDN and NFV implementations and is aiming to be a key player in this space.
In addition to building its own private cloud solution on top of Open Stack, the company is in the process of migrating enterprise applications and IT workloads to AWS. As part of its data center consolidation, the client is implementing a hybrid cloud solution with N+1 redundancy architecture.
Existing system:
The Data Centers have thousands of VMs on a VMWare server farm that run .NET and Java applications on Windows and Linux environments. About 160 of the productivity applications must be migrated to AWS after due diligence on Capacity / IOPS requirements. The SAP and in-house engineering applications would be migrating to a private cloud built on OpenStack. An orchestration layer is built to provision VMs as part of the private cloud and this is different from the AWS environment for the office productivity applications. The private cloud will be supported by a DevOps enabled operations team from India on a Follow the Sun approach.
Key business requirements were:
- Ensure migration of 160 productivity applications and VMs to AWS in less than 9 months.
- Automate the process of creating infrastructure using Ansible scripts and preserver the security settings in its entirety.
- Develop a self-service portal to streamline the provisioning of resources for the Hybrid Cloud deployment – reduce lead time from 2 days to few hours
- Monitor the applications for uptime and performance in both the private and public cloud environments
Choice of Cloud platform:
The Client has already chosen RHEL Open Stack and AWS as the cloud platforms after due diligence. The robustness and scalability of the platform, options for compute, memory, storage, bandwidth, multiple zones, and open APIs were critical factors. The monitoring tools like Nagios, Splunk, and New Relic have been decided by the IT team of the client.
Solution Overview:
With a deep understanding of the AWS and Open Stack features to address the client requirements, Newt Global offered the following solution. The initial design of the Open Stack-based architecture was done by the client and they needed the validation of manageability aspects and sizing assumptions from Newt Global as a neutral consultant. Migration of key workloads was done after the appropriate infrastructure was provisioned through automation scripts.
Migration to AWS of the productivity applications was Lift and Shift for the most part and Ansible Tower was used for IAC process for both private cloud and AWS. Monitoring tools like Splunk for the private cloud and Nagios and New Relic for AWS were configured.
Created workflow to manage IAM policies for groups of users and ensured seamless communication between AWS and the private cloud set-up. A framework based on DevOps principles was developed to provide support for the Hybrid Cloud environment.
Business benefits:
- Deployments to on AWS were streamlined through automation and timeline for migration was reduced by 30%.
- The Synchronization between Development and Deployment was improved by over 50% in the case of Private Cloud implementation.
- Continuous monitoring of the applications and Infra-structure open with source and AWS services like CloudWatch, dramatically improved remediation times in the event of outages, peaks in utilization etc.,