case study in cloud migration

10 Important Cloud Migration Case Studies You Need to Know

Aug 1, 2019 | Engineering

For most businesses considering cloud migration, the move is filled with promise and potential. Scalability, flexibility, reliability, cost-effectiveness, improved performance and disaster recovery, and simpler, faster deployment — what’s not to like? 

It’s important to understand that cloud platform benefits come alongside considerable challenges, including the need to improve availability and latency, auto-scale orchestration, manage tricky connections, scale the development process effectively, and address cloud security challenges. While advancements in virtualization and containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) are helping many businesses solve these challenges, cloud migration is no simple matter. 

That’s why, when considering your organization’s cloud migration strategy, it’s beneficial to look at case studies and examples from other companies’ cloud migration experiences. Why did they do it? How did they go about it? What happened? What benefits did they see, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing for these businesses? Most importantly, what lessons did they learn — and what can you learn from them? 

With that in mind, Distillery has put together 10 cloud migration case studies your business can learn from. While most of the case studies feature companies moving from on-premise, bare metal data centers to cloud, we also look at companies moving from cloud to cloud, cloud to multi-cloud, and even off the cloud. Armed with all these lessons, ideas, and strategies, you’ll feel readier than ever to make the cloud work for your business.

Challenges for Cloud Adoption: Is Your Organization Ready to Scale and Be Cloud-first?

We examine several of these case studies from a more technical perspective in our white paper on Top Challenges for Cloud Adoption in 2019 . In this white paper, you’ll learn:

• Why cloud platform development created scaling challenges for businesses
• How scaling fits into the big picture of the Cloud Maturity Framework
• Why advancements in virtualization and containerization have helped businesses solve these scaling challenges
• How companies like Betabrand, Shopify, Spotify, Evernote, Waze, and others have solved these scaling challenges while continuing to innovate their businesses and provide value to users

#1 Betabrand : Bare Metal to Cloud

Betabrand (est. 2005) is a crowd-funded, crowd-sourced retail clothing e-commerce company that designs, manufactures, and releases limited-quantity products via its website. 

Migration Objective 

The company struggled with the maintenance difficulties and lack of scalability of the bare metal infrastructure supporting their operations. 

Planning for and adding capacity took too much time and added costs. They also needed the ability to better handle website traffic surges.

Migration Strategy and Results 

In anticipation of 2017’s Black Friday increased web traffic, Betabrand migrated to a Google Cloud infrastructure managed by Kubernetes (Google Kubernetes Engine, or GKE). They experienced no issues related to the migration, and Black Friday 2017 was a success. 

By Black Friday 2018, early load testing and auto-scaling cloud infrastructure helped them to handle peak loads with zero issues. The company hasn’t experienced a single outage since migrating to the cloud.

Key Takeaways

• With advance planning, cloud migration can be a simple process. Betabrand’s 2017 on-premise to cloud migration proved smooth and simple. In advance of actual migration, they created multiple clusters in GKE and performed several test migrations, thereby identifying the right steps for a successful launch.
• Cloud streamlines load testing. Betabrand was able to quickly create a replica of its production services that they could use in load testing. Tests revealed poorly performing code paths that would only be revealed by heavy loads. They were able to fix the issues before Black Friday. 
• Cloud’s scalability is key to customer satisfaction. As a fast-growing e-commerce business, Betabrand realized they couldn’t afford the downtime or delays of bare metal. Their cloud infrastructure scales automatically, helping them avoid issues and keep customers happy. This factor alone underlines the strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations like Betabrand. 

#2 Shopify : Cloud to Cloud

Shopify (est. 2006) provides a proprietary e-commerce software platform upon which businesses can build and run online stores and retail point-of-sale (POS) systems. 

Shopify wanted to ensure they were using the best tools possible to support the evolution needed to meet increasing customer demand. Though they’d always been a cloud-based organization, building and running their e-commerce cloud with their own data centers, they sought to capitalize on the container-based cloud benefits of immutable infrastructure to provide better support to their customers. Specifically, they wanted to ensure predictable, repeatable builds and deployments; simpler and more robust rollbacks; and elimination of configuration management drift. 

By building out their cloud with Google, building a “Shop Mover” database migration tool, and leveraging Docker containers and Kubernetes, Shopify has been able to transform its data center to better support customers’ online shops, meeting all their objectives. For Shopify customers, the increasingly scalable, resilient applications mean improved consistency, reliability, and version control.

• Immutable infrastructure vastly improves deployments. Since cloud servers are never modified post-deployment, configuration drift — in which undocumented changes to servers can cause them to diverge from one another and from the originally deployed configuration — is minimized or eliminated. This means deployments are easier, simpler, and more consistent.
• Scalability is central to meeting the changing needs of dynamic e-commerce businesses. Shopify is home to online shops like Kylie Cosmetics, which hosts flash sales that can sell out in 20 seconds. Shopify’s cloud-to-cloud migration helped its servers flex to meet fluctuating demand, ensuring that commerce isn’t slowed or disrupted.

#3 Spotify: Bare Metal to Cloud

Spotify (est. 2006) is a media services provider primarily focused on its audio-streaming platform, which lets users search for, listen to, and share music and podcasts.

Spotify’s leadership and engineering team agreed: The company’s massive in-house data centers were difficult to provision and maintain, and they didn’t directly serve the company’s goal of being the “best music service in the world.” They wanted to free up Spotify’s engineers to focus on innovation. They started planning for migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in 2015, hoping to minimize disruption to product development, and minimize the cost and complexity of hybrid operation. 

Spotify invested two years pre-migration in preparing, assigning a dedicated Spotify/Google cloud migration team to oversee the effort. Ultimately, they split the effort into two parts, services and data, which took a year apiece. For services migration, engineering teams moved services to the cloud in focused two-week sprints, pausing on product development. For data migration, teams were allowed to choose between “forklifting” or rewriting options to best fit their needs. Ultimately, Spotify’s on-premise to cloud migration succeeded in increasing scalability while freeing up developers to innovate. 

• Gaining stakeholder buy-in is crucial. Spotify was careful to consult its engineers about the vision. Once they could see what their jobs looked like in the future, they were all-in advocates. 
• Migration preparation shouldn’t be rushed. Spotify’s dedicated migration team took the time to investigate various cloud strategies and build out the use case demonstrating the benefits of cloud computing to the business. They carefully mapped all dependencies. They also worked with Google to identify and orchestrate the right cloud strategies and solutions. 
• Focus and dedication pay huge dividends. Spotify’s dedicated migration team kept everything on track and in focus, making sure everyone involved was aware of past experience and lessons already learned. In addition, since engineering teams were fully focused on the migration effort, they were able to complete it more quickly, reducing the disruption to product development.

#4 Evernote : Bare Metal to Cloud

Evernote (est. 2008) is a collaborative, cross-platform note-taking and task management application that helps users capture, organize, and track ideas, tasks, and deadlines.

Evernote, which had maintained its own servers and network since inception, was feeling increasingly limited by its infrastructure. It was difficult to scale, and time-consuming and expensive to maintain. They wanted more flexibility, as well as to improve Evernote’s speed, reliability, security, and disaster recovery planning. To minimize service disruption, they hoped to conduct the on-premise to cloud migration as efficiently as possible. 

Starting in 2016, Evernote used an iterative approach : They built a strawman based on strategic decisions, tested its viability, and rapidly iterated. They then settled on a cloud migration strategy that used a phased cutover approach, enabling them to test parts of the migration before committing. They also added important levels of security by using GCP service accounts , achieving “encryption at rest,” and improving disaster recovery processes. Evernote successfully migrated 5 billion notes and 5 billion attachments to GCP in only 70 days. 

• Cloud migration doesn’t have to happen all at once. You can migrate services in phases or waves grouped by service or user. Evernote’s phased cutover approach allowed for rollback points if things weren’t going to according to plan, reducing migration risk. 
• Ensuring data security in the cloud may require extra steps. Cloud security challenges may require extra focus in your cloud migration effort. Evernote worked with Google to create the additional security layers their business required. GCP service accounts can be customized and configured to use built-in public/private key pairs managed and rotated daily by Google.
• Cloud capabilities can improve disaster recovery planning. Evernote wanted to ensure that they would be better prepared to quickly recover customer data in the event of a disaster. Cloud’s reliable, redundant, and robust data backups help make this possible. 

#5 Etsy : Bare Metal to Cloud

Etsy (est. 2005) is a global e-commerce platform that allows sellers to build and run online stores selling handmade and vintage items and crafting supplies.

Etsy had maintained its own infrastructure from inception. In 2018, they decided to re-evaluate whether cloud was right for the company’s future. In particular, they sought to improve site performance, engineering efficiency, and UX. They also wanted to ensure long-term scalability and sustainability, as well as to spend less time maintaining infrastructure and more time executing strategy.

Migration Strategy and Results

Etsy undertook a detailed vendor selection process , ultimately identifying GCP as the right choice for their cloud migration strategy . Since they’d already been running their own Kubernetes cluster inside their data center, they already had a partial solution for deploying to GKE. They initially deployed in a hybrid environment (private data center and GKE), providing redundancy, reducing risk, and allowing them to perform A/B testing. They’re on target to complete the migration and achieve all objectives. 

Key Takeaways 

• Business needs and technology fit should be periodically reassessed. While bare metal was the right choice for Etsy when it launched in 2005, improvements in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) made cloud migration the right choice in 2018.
• Detailed analysis can help businesses identify the right cloud solution for their needs. Etsy took a highly strategic approach to assessment that included requirements definition, RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) matrices, and architectural reviews. This helped them ensure that their cloud migration solution would genuinely help them achieve all their goals.
• Hybrid deployment can be effective for reducing cloud migration risk. Dual deployment on their private data center and GKE was an important aspect of Etsy’s cloud migration strategy. 

#6 Waze : Cloud to Multi-cloud

Waze (est. 2006; acquired by Google in 2013) is a GPS-enabled navigation application that uses real-time user location data and user-submitted reports to suggest optimized routes.

Though Waze moved to the cloud very early on, their fast growth quickly led to production issues that caused painful rollbacks, bottlenecks, and other complications. They needed to find a way to get faster feedback to users while mitigating or eliminating their production issues.  

Waze decided to run an active-active architecture across multiple cloud providers — GCP and Amazon Web Services (AWS) — to improve the resiliency of their production systems. This means they’re better-positioned to survive a DNS DDOS attack, or a regional or global failure. An open source continuous delivery platform called Spinnaker helps them deploy software changes while making rollbacks easy and reliable. Spinnaker makes it easy for Waze’s engineers to deploy across both cloud platforms, using a consistent conceptual model that doesn’t rely on detailed knowledge of either platform .  

• Some business models may be a better fit for multiple clouds. Cloud strategies are not one-size-fits-all. Waze’s stability and reliability depends on avoiding downtime, deploying quick fixes to bugs, and ensuring the resiliency of their production systems. Running on two clouds at once helps make it all happen. 
• Your engineers don’t necessarily have to be cloud experts to deploy effectively. Spinnaker streamlines multi-cloud deployment for Waze such that developers can focus on development, rather than on becoming cloud experts. 

Deploying software more frequently doesn’t have to mean reduced stability/reliability. Continuous delivery can get you to market faster, improving quality while reducing risk and cost.

#7 AdvancedMD : Bare Metal to Cloud

AdvancedMD (est. 1999) is a software platform used by medical professionals to manage their practices, securely share information, and manage workflow, billing, and other tasks. 

AdvancedMD was being spun off from its parent company, ADP; to operate independently, it had to move all its data out of ADP’s data center. Since they handle highly sensitive, protected patient data that must remain available to practitioners at a moment’s notice, security and availability were top priorities. They sought an affordable, easy-to-manage, and easy-to-deploy solution that would scale to fit their customers’ changing needs while keeping patient data secure and available.

AdvancedMD’s on-premise to cloud migration would avoid the need to hire in-house storage experts, save them and their customers money, ensure availability, and let them quickly flex capacity to accommodate fluctuating needs. It also offered the simplicity and security they needed. Since AdvancedMD was already running NetApp storage arrays in its data center, it was easy to use NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP to move their data to AWS. ONTAP also provides the enterprise-level data protection and encryption they require.

• Again, ensuring data security in the cloud may require extra steps. Though cloud has improved or mitigated some security concerns (e.g., vulnerable OS dependencies, long-lived compromised servers), hackers have turned their focus to the vulnerabilities that remain. Thus, your cloud migration strategy may need extra layers of controls (e.g., permissions, policies, encryption) to address these cloud security challenges.
• When service costs are a concern, cloud’s flexibility may help. AdvancedMD customers are small to mid-sized budget-conscious businesses. Since cloud auto-scales, AdvancedMD never pays for more cloud infrastructure than they’re actually using. That helps them keep customer pricing affordable.

#8 Dropbox : Cloud to Hybrid

Dropbox (est. 2007) is a file hosting service that provides cloud storage and file synchronization solutions for customers.

Dropbox had developed its business by using the cloud — specifically, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) — to house data while keeping metadata housed on-premise. Over time, they began to fear they’d become overly dependent on Amazon: not only were costs increasing as their storage needs grew, but Amazon was also planning a similar service offering, Amazon WorkDocs. Dropbox decided to take back their storage to help them reduce costs, increase control, and maintain their competitive edge. 

While the task of moving all that data to an in-house infrastructure was daunting, the company decided it was worth it — at least in the US (Dropbox assessed that in Europe, AWS is still the best fit). Dropbox designed in-house and built a massive network of new-breed machines orchestrated by software built with an entirely new programming language, moving about 90% of its files back to its own servers . Dropbox’s expanded in-house capabilities have enabled them to offer Project Infinite, which provides desktop users with universal compatibility and unlimited real-time data access.

• On-premise infrastructure may still be right for some businesses. Since Dropbox’s core product relies on fast, reliable data access and storage, they need to ensure consistently high performance at a sustainable cost. Going in-house required a huge investment, but improved performance and reduced costs may serve them better in the long run. Once Dropbox understood that big picture, they had to recalculate the strategic importance of cloud computing to their organization.  
• Size matters. As Wired lays out in its article detailing the move , cloud businesses are not charities. There’s always going to be margin somewhere. If a business is big enough — like Dropbox — it may make sense to take on the difficulties of building a massive in-house network. But it’s a huge risk for businesses that aren’t big enough, or whose growth may stall.

#9 GitLab : Cloud to Cloud

GitLab (est. 2011) is an open core company that provides a single application supporting the entire DevOps life cycle for more than 100,000 organizations. 

GitLab’s core application enables software development teams to collaborate on projects in real time, avoiding both handoffs and delays. GitLab wanted to improve performance and reliability, accelerating development while making it as seamless, efficient, and error-free as possible. While they acknowledged that Microsoft Azure had been a great cloud provider, they strongly believed that GCP’s Kubernetes was the future, calling it “a technology that makes reliability at massive scale possible.” 

In 2018, GitLab migrated from Azure to GCP so that GitLab could run as a cloud-native application on GKE. They used their own Geo product to migrate the data, initially mirroring the data between Azure and GCP. Post-migration, GitLab reported improved performance (including fewer latency spikes) and a 61% improvement in availability.    

• Containers are seen by many as the future of DevOps. GitLab was explicit that they view Kubernetes as the future. Indeed, containers provide notable benefits, including a smaller footprint, predictability, and the ability to scale up and down in real time. For GitLab’s users, the company’s cloud-to-cloud migration makes it easier to get started with using Kubernetes for DevOps.
• Improved stability and availability can be a big benefit of cloud migration. In GitLab’s case, mean-time between outage events pre-migration was 1.3 days. Excluding the first day post-migration, they’re up to 12 days between outage events. Pre-migration, they averaged 32 minutes of downtime weekly; post-migration, they’re down to 5. 

#10 Cordant Group : Bare Metal to Hybrid

The Cordant Group (est. 1957) is a global social enterprise that provides a range of services and solutions, including recruitment, security, cleaning, health care, and technical electrical.

Over the years, the Cordant Group had grown tremendously, requiring an extensive IT infrastructure to support their vast range of services. While they’d previously focused on capital expenses, they’d shifted to looking at OpEx, or operational expenses — which meant cloud’s “pay as you go” model made increasing sense. It was also crucial to ensure ease of use and robust data backups.

They began by moving to a virtual private cloud on AWS , but found that the restriction to use Windows DFS for file server resource management was creating access problems. NetApp Cloud ONTAP, a software storage appliance that runs on AWS server and storage resources, solved the issue. File and storage management is easier than ever, and backups are robust, which means that important data restores quickly. The solution also monitors resource costs over time, enabling more accurate planning that drives additional cost savings. 

• Business and user needs drive cloud needs. That’s why cloud strategies will absolutely vary based on a company’s unique needs. The Cordant Group needed to revisit its cloud computing strategy when users were unable to quickly access the files they needed. In addition, with such a diverse user group, ease of use had to be a top priority.
• Cloud ROI ultimately depends on how your business measures ROI. The strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations is specific to each organization. Cloud became the right answer for the Cordant Group when OpEx became the company’s dominant lens. 

Which Cloud Migration Strategy Is Right for You?

As these 10 diverse case studies show, cloud strategies are not one-size-fits all. Choosing the right cloud migration strategy for your business depends on several factors, including your:

• Goals. What business results do you want to achieve as a result of the migration? How does your business measure ROI? What problems are you trying to solve via your cloud migration strategy? 
• Business model. What is your current state? What are your core products/services and user needs, and how are they impacted by how and where data is stored? What are your development and deployment needs, issues, and constraints? What are your organization’s cost drivers? How is your business impacted by lack of stability or availability? Can you afford downtime? 
• Security needs. What are your requirements regarding data privacy, confidentiality, encryption, identity and access management, and regulatory compliance? Which cloud security challenges pose potential problems for your business?
• Scaling needs. Do your needs and usage fluctuate? Do you expect to grow or shrink? 
• Disaster recovery and business continuity needs. What are your needs and capabilities in this area? How might your business be impacted in the event of a major disaster — or even a minor service interruption? 
• Technical expertise. What expertise do you need to run and innovate your core business? What expertise do you have in-house? Are you allocating your in-house expertise to the right efforts? 
• Team focus and capacity. How much time and focus can your team dedicate to the cloud migration effort? 
• Timeline. What business needs constrain your timeline? What core business activities must remain uninterrupted? How much time can you allow for planning and testing your cloud migration strategy? 

Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive. These questions are only a starting point. But getting started — with planning, better understanding your goals and drivers, and assessing potential technology fit — is the most important step of any cloud migration process. We hope these 10 case studies have helped to get you thinking in the right direction. 

While the challenges of cloud migration are considerable, the right guidance, planning, and tools can lead you to the cloud strategies and solutions that will work best for your business. So don’t delay: Take that first step to helping your business reap the potential advantages and benefits of cloud computing. 

Ready to take the next step on your cloud journey? As a Certified Google Cloud Technology Partner , Distillery is here to help. Download our white paper on top challenges for cloud adoption to get tactical and strategic about using cloud to transform your business.  

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7 best case-studies for migrating from on-premise to cloud.

For most businesses considering cloud migration, it’s essential to understand that cloud platform benefits come alongside considerable challenges, including improving availability and latency, auto-scale orchestration, managing tricky connections, scaling the development process effectively, and addressing cloud security challenges.

A transformation example when moving from On-premise to Cloud

#1 Betabrand: Bare Metal to Cloud

CloudBetabrand  (est. 2005) is a crowd-funded, crowd-sourced retail clothing e-commerce company that designs, manufactures, and releases limited-quantity products via its website.

– Migration objective 

The company struggled with the maintenance difficulties and lack of scalability of the bare metal infrastructure supporting their operations. Planning for and adding capacity took too much time and added costs. They also needed the ability to handle website traffic surges better.

– Key Takeaways

• With planning, cloud migration can be a simple process. Betabrand’s 2017 on-premise to cloud migration proved smooth and simple. Before actual migration, they created multiple clusters in GKE and performed several test migrations, identifying the right steps for a successful launch.
• Cloud streamlines load testing.  Betabrand was able to quickly create a replica of its production services that they could use in load testing. Tests revealed poorly performing code paths that would only be revealed by heavy loads. They could fix the issues before Black Friday.
• Cloud’s scalability is key to customer satisfaction.  As a fast-growing e-commerce business, Betabrand realized they couldn’t afford the downtime or delays of bare metal. Their cloud infrastructure scales automatically, helping them avoid issues and keep customers happy. This factor alone underlines the strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations like Betabrand.

#2 Spotify: Bare Metal to Cloud

Spotify’s leadership and engineering team agreed: The company’s massive in-house data centers were difficult to provision and maintain, and they didn’t directly serve the company’s goal of being the “best music service in the world.” They wanted to free up Spotify’s engineers to focus on innovation. They started planning for migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in 2015, hoping to minimize disruption to product development and minimize the cost and complexity of hybrid operation.

• Gaining stakeholder buy-in is crucial.  Spotify was careful to consult its engineers about the vision. Once they could see what their jobs looked like in the future, they were all-in advocates.
• Migration preparation shouldn’t be rushed.  Spotify’s dedicated migration team took the time to investigate various cloud strategies and build out the use case showing the benefits of cloud computing to the business. They carefully mapped all dependencies. They also worked with Google to identify and orchestrate the right cloud strategies and solutions.
• Focus and dedication pay huge dividends.  Spotify’s dedicated migration team kept everything on track and in focus, making sure everyone involved was aware of experience and lessons already learned. In addition, since engineering teams were fully focused on the migration effort, they could complete it more quickly, reducing the disruption to product development

#3 Waze: Cloud to Multi-cloud

Waze (est. 2006; acquired by Google in 2013) is a GPS-enabled navigation application that uses real-time user location data and user-submitted reports to suggest optimized routes.

Though Waze moved to the cloud very early on, their fast growth quickly led to production issues that caused painful rollbacks, bottlenecks, and other complications. They needed to get faster feedback to users while mitigating or eliminating their production issues.

• Some business models may be a better fit for multiple clouds.  Cloud strategies are not one-size-fits-all. Waze’s stability and reliability depend on avoiding downtime, deploying quick fixes to bugs, and ensuring the resiliency of their production systems. Running on two clouds at once helps make it all happen.
• Your engineers don’t have to be cloud experts to deploy effectively. Spinnaker streamlines multi-cloud deployment for Waze such that developers can focus on development, rather than on becoming cloud experts.
• Deploying software more frequently doesn’t have to mean reduced stability/reliability c ontinuous delivery can get you to market faster, improving quality while reducing risk and cost.

#4 Dropbox: Cloud to Hybrid

Dropbox had developed its business by using the cloud — specifically, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) — to house data while keeping metadata housed on-premise. Over time, they feared they’d become overly dependent on Amazon: not only were costs increasing as their storage needs grew, but Amazon was also planning a similar service offering, Amazon WorkDocs. Dropbox took back their storage to help them reduce costs, increase control, and maintain their competitive edge.

• On-premise infrastructure may still be right for some businesses.  Since Dropbox’s core product relies on fast, reliable data access and storage, they need to ensure consistently high performance at a sustainable cost. Going in-house required an enormous investment, but improved performance and reduced costs may serve them better in the long run. Once Dropbox understood that big picture, they had to recalculate the strategic importance of cloud computing to their organization.
• Size matters.  As  Wired  lays out in  its article detailing the move , cloud businesses are not charities. There’s always going to be a margin, a margin somewhere. If a business is big enough — like Dropbox — it may make sense to take on the difficulties of building a massive in-house network. But tension enormous risk, an enormous risk for businesses that aren’t big enough, or whose growth may stall.

#5 GitLab: Cloud to Cloud

GitLab’s core application enables software development teams to collaborate on projects in real time, avoiding both handoffs and delays. GitLab wanted to improve performance and reliability, accelerating development while making it as seamless, efficient, and error-free as possible. While they acknowledged Microsoft Azure had been a great cloud provider, they strongly believed that GCP’s Kubernetes were the future, calling it “a technology that makes reliability at massive scale possible.”

• Containers are seen by many as the future of DevOps.  GitLab was explicit that they view Kubernetes as the future.   Indeed, containers provide notable benefits, including a smaller footprint, predictability, and the ability to scale up and down in real time. For GitLab’s users, the company’s cloud-to-cloud migration makes it easier to get started with using Kubernetes for DevOps.
• An enormous benefit, improved stability and availability can be an enormous benefit of cloud migration. In GitLab’s case, mean-time between outage events pre-migration was 1.3 days. Excluding the first day post-migration, they’re up to 12 days between outage events. Pre-migration, they averaged 32 minutes of downtime weekly; post-migration, they’re down to 5.

#6 Cordant Group: Bare Metal to Hybrid

– Migration objective

Over the years, the Cordant Group had grown tremendously, requiring an extensive IT infrastructure to support their vast range of services. While they’d previously focused on capital expenses, they’d shifted to looking at OpEx, or operational expenses — which meant cloud’s “pay as you go” model made increasing sense. It was also crucial to ensure ease of use and robust data backups.

• Business and user needs drive cloud needs.  That’s why cloud strategies will absolutely vary based on a company’s unique needs. The Cordant Group needed to revisit its cloud computing strategy when users were unable to quickly access the files they needed. In addition, with such a diverse user group, ease of use had to be a top priority.
• Cloud ROI ultimately depends on how your business measures ROI.  The strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations is specific to each organization. Cloud became the right answer for the Cordant Group when OpEx became the company’s dominant lens.

#7 Shopify: Cloud to Cloud

Shopify wanted to ensure they were using the best tools possible to support the evolution needed to meet increasing customer demand. Though they’d always been a cloud-based organization, building and running their e-commerce cloud with their own data centers, they sought to capitalize on the container-based cloud benefits of immutable infrastructure to provide better support to their customers. Specifically, they wanted to ensure predictable, repeatable builds and deployments; simpler and more robust rollbacks; and elimination of configuration management drift.

• Immutable infrastructure vastly improves deployments.  Since cloud servers are never modified post-deployment, configuration drift — in which undocumented changes to servers can cause them to diverge from one another and from the originally deployed configuration — is minimized or eliminated. This means deployments are easier, simpler, and more consistent.
• Scalability is central to meeting the changing needs of dynamic e-commerce businesses.  Shopify is home to online shops like Kylie Cosmetics, which hosts flash sales that can sell out in 20 seconds. Shopify’s cloud-to-cloud migration helped its servers flex to meet fluctuating demand, ensuring that commerce isn’t slowed or disrupted.

Which Cloud Migration Strategy Is Right for You?

As these 7 case studies show, cloud strategies are not one-size-fits all. Choosing the right cloud migration strategy for your business depends on several factors, including your:

• Goals. What business results do you want to achieve because of the migration? How does your business measure ROI? What problems are you trying to solve via your cloud migration strategy?
• Business model.  What is your current state? What are your core products/services and user needs, and how are they affected by how and where data is stored? What are your development and deployment needs, issues, and constraints? What are your organization’s cost drivers? How is your business affected by lack of stability or availability? Can you afford downtime?
• Security needs.  What are your requirements regarding data privacy, confidentiality, encryption, identity and access management, and regulatory compliance? Which cloud security challenges pose potential problems for your business?
• Scaling needs.  Do your needs and usage fluctuate? Do you expect to grow or shrink?
• Disaster recovery and business continuity needs. What are your needs and capabilities in this area? How might your business be affected in the event of a major disaster — or even a minor service interruption?
• Technical expertise.  What expertise do you need to run and innovate your core business? What expertise do you have in-house? Are you allocating your in-house expertise to the right efforts?
• Team focus and capacity.  How much time and focus can your team dedicate to the cloud migration effort?
• Timeline.  What business needs to constrain your timeline? What core business activities must remain uninterrupted? How much time can you allow for planning and testing your cloud migration strategy?

In short, with the list of questions above and 7 case studies of companies’ successful cloud migrations. You can start with a plan, understanding the goals and desires of your business. Learn the right tools to lead you to cloud strategies and solutions that will work best for your business.

Ready to take the next step on your cloud journey?

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Case Studies: Successful Cloud Migration Stories

• Case Studies: Successful Cloud Migration…

Introduction

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the transition to cloud computing represents a pivotal shift for businesses seeking agility, scalability, and cost efficiency. Cloud migration, the process of moving digital assets like data, applications, and IT processes to cloud infrastructure, has become a critical strategy for organizations aiming to stay competitive and responsive to market demands.

As we delve into the world of cloud migration, this article aims to provide real-world insights through case studies of businesses that have successfully navigated the journey to the cloud. We will explore the challenges they faced, the strategies employed, and the benefits they reaped. These stories serve as valuable lessons for other businesses contemplating a similar transition.

Case Study 1: Large Retail Corporation’s Transition to AWS

Background of the company.

This case study examines a large retail corporation, known for its vast network of stores and an extensive range of products. The company has been a significant player in the retail industry for decades, with a robust physical presence and a growing online footprint. As the retail landscape evolved, the company recognized the need to innovate and adapt, particularly in its approach to data management and customer experience.

Challenges Faced Before Migration

• Scalability Issues: The company’s existing IT infrastructure struggled to handle the increasing volume of data and transactions, especially during peak shopping seasons.
• Cost Inefficiency: Maintaining and upgrading physical servers was becoming prohibitively expensive, diverting funds from other critical areas like customer experience and product development.
• Data Silos and Integration Challenges: Data was scattered across different departments, leading to inefficiencies and inconsistencies in reporting and analysis.
• Lack of Agility: The existing infrastructure did not allow for rapid deployment of new features or services, impeding the company’s ability to respond to market trends and customer demands.

The Migration Process

• Planning and Assessment: The company collaborated with AWS experts to develop a comprehensive migration strategy. This included assessing their existing infrastructure, data requirements, and future scalability needs.
• Pilot Projects: Before full-scale migration, the company initiated pilot projects for critical applications to understand the complexities and refine the process.
• Data Migration: A phased approach was used to migrate data. The company utilized AWS tools like AWS Database Migration Service to ensure a smooth transition.
• Application Refactoring: Some legacy applications were refactored to be cloud-native, taking full advantage of AWS services and scalability.
• Employee Training and Change Management: To ensure a smooth transition, the company invested in training its employees in cloud technologies and new operational processes.

Benefits Realized Post-Migration

• Enhanced Scalability and Performance: AWS’s scalable infrastructure allowed the company to efficiently handle traffic spikes and manage data growth.
• Cost Savings: The pay-as-you-go model of AWS significantly reduced operational costs. The company saved on hardware costs and the expenses related to maintaining physical servers.
• Improved Data Analytics and Insights: With AWS’s integrated analytics tools, the company gained deeper insights into customer behavior, enabling data-driven decision-making.
• Increased Agility and Innovation: The cloud environment enabled the company to rapidly deploy new features and services, responding swiftly to market trends and enhancing customer experience.
• Enhanced Security and Compliance: AWS’s robust security features ensured better protection of sensitive data, aligning with industry compliance standards.

The transition to AWS marked a turning point for the retail corporation. Not only did it address the immediate challenges of scalability, cost, and agility, but it also positioned the company to be more innovative and customer-centric. This case study exemplifies how a well-planned and executed cloud migration can transform a traditional business into a modern, agile enterprise, ready to face the challenges of the digital age.

Case Study 2: Financial Services Company’s Shift to Azure

Company profile.

This case study focuses on a prominent financial services company, offering a range of services including banking, investment, and insurance. Established over a century ago, the company has built a reputation for stability and trust. However, in the digital era, it faced the challenge of modernizing its infrastructure to stay competitive and meet evolving customer expectations.

Pre-Migration Issues

• Regulatory Compliance and Security Concerns: As a financial institution, the company was bound by strict regulatory requirements for data security and privacy. Their legacy systems were becoming inadequate for the evolving compliance landscape.
• Inefficient Legacy Systems: The company’s aging infrastructure was not only costly to maintain but also lacked the flexibility and efficiency needed for modern financial services.
• Data Management Challenges: With the growing volume of data, their existing setup struggled to provide the necessary processing power for real-time analytics, a critical component in financial services.
• Limited Customer Experience Capabilities: The company’s inability to quickly deploy new customer-facing applications hindered their capacity to provide innovative services and engage with customers digitally.

Steps Taken for Migration

• Strategic Planning with Azure Experts: The company worked closely with Microsoft Azure specialists to create a tailored migration strategy that aligned with their business goals and regulatory requirements.
• Risk Assessment and Compliance Alignment: A thorough risk assessment was conducted to ensure that the migration would adhere to financial regulatory standards. Azure’s compliance offerings were a key factor in this process.
• Hybrid Cloud Approach: Initially, the company adopted a hybrid cloud model, keeping some sensitive operations on-premise while moving others to Azure. This approach provided flexibility and eased the transition.
• Application and Data Migration: Critical applications were moved to Azure, leveraging Azure’s robust infrastructure and security features. Data migration was handled cautiously to ensure integrity and security.
• Employee Upskilling and Change Management: Significant investments were made in training employees to adapt to the new cloud-based environment and processes.

Outcomes and Advantages

• Enhanced Security and Compliance: Azure’s advanced security features and compliance certifications provided the company with a robust framework, ensuring data safety and regulatory adherence.
• Improved Scalability and Performance: The Azure cloud environment allowed for seamless scaling of resources during demand fluctuations, crucial for financial operations.
• Cost Efficiency: By moving to Azure, the company reduced its operational costs significantly, eliminating expenses associated with maintaining physical data centers.
• Advanced Data Analytics Capabilities: Azure’s analytics tools enabled the company to process large datasets efficiently, providing real-time insights for better decision-making.
• Innovation in Customer Services: With the flexibility offered by Azure, the company was able to rapidly develop and deploy new customer-centric applications, enhancing customer experience and engagement.

The migration to Azure was a transformative journey for the financial services company. It not only resolved the immediate challenges of compliance, data management, and customer engagement but also positioned the company for future growth and innovation. This case study demonstrates how cloud migration, when strategically planned and executed, can empower traditional institutions to reinvent themselves in the digital age.

Case Study 3: Healthcare Provider’s Move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Introduction to the healthcare provider.

This case study examines a large healthcare provider known for its comprehensive range of services, including hospital care, outpatient services, and telemedicine. With a network of healthcare facilities across various regions, the provider is recognized for its commitment to patient care and medical innovation. As healthcare increasingly embraced digital solutions, this provider sought to leverage technology to enhance patient care and operational efficiency.

Challenges in Data Management and Security

• Massive Data Volumes: Handling the vast amounts of patient data, including medical records, imaging data, and laboratory results, was becoming increasingly complex and demanding on the existing IT infrastructure.
• Security and Privacy Concerns: Given the sensitive nature of health data, the provider faced significant challenges in ensuring data privacy and security, a critical aspect given the stringent regulatory standards like HIPAA.
• Lack of Scalability: The existing IT infrastructure was not scalable enough to keep up with the growing data needs and the rapid adoption of telehealth services.
• Integration Issues: Integrating various data sources and systems for a unified patient view was difficult with the outdated technology stack.

Migration Strategy

• Comprehensive Assessment with GCP Experts: The healthcare provider collaborated with Google Cloud Platform specialists to assess their current infrastructure and devise a tailored cloud migration strategy.
• Data Security and Compliance Focus: A major emphasis was placed on ensuring that the migration to GCP complied with healthcare-related regulations and standards for data security.
• Phased Migration Approach: The migration was executed in phases, beginning with less critical systems to minimize disruptions in patient care services.
• Utilization of GCP’s Healthcare-specific Solutions: The provider leveraged GCP’s healthcare-specific tools and services, such as the Healthcare API, for seamless data integration and management.
• Training and Support for Staff: Comprehensive training programs were implemented to familiarize the staff with the new cloud-based systems and processes.

Post-Migration Improvements

• Enhanced Data Management and Analytics: With GCP, the provider benefited from improved data storage, management, and analytics capabilities, enabling more effective patient care and research.
• Robust Security and Compliance: GCP’s strong security features and compliance with healthcare standards provided a secure environment for patient data, addressing privacy concerns.
• Increased Scalability and Flexibility: The cloud infrastructure allowed the provider to easily scale resources up or down based on demand, particularly valuable for handling the surge in telehealth consultations.
• Improved Patient Care and Services: The integration of various data sources into a cohesive cloud platform enabled more personalized and efficient patient care, with quicker access to patient records and diagnostic tools.
• Cost Efficiency: Transitioning to GCP reduced the overall IT maintenance costs, allowing more resources to be allocated to patient care and medical research.

The migration to Google Cloud Platform marked a significant step forward for the healthcare provider in its digital transformation journey. By overcoming the challenges of data management, security, and scalability, the provider not only enhanced its operational efficiency but also elevated the level of patient care it could offer. This case study serves as a testament to the transformative potential of cloud technology in the healthcare sector, especially when tailored to meet the unique needs and regulatory demands of the industry.

Comparative Analysis

The case studies of a retail corporation’s transition to AWS, a financial services company’s shift to Azure, and a healthcare provider’s move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provide insightful perspectives on cloud migration across different industries. Despite the distinct nature of each sector, there are common challenges, unique issues, and overarching benefits that can be observed.

Common Challenges Faced in All Three Cases

• Data Management and Scalability: All three organizations struggled with managing large volumes of data and required scalable solutions to accommodate growth.
• Security and Compliance: Ensuring data security and meeting industry-specific regulatory compliance standards was a universal concern.
• Legacy System Inefficiencies: Each organization faced challenges with outdated infrastructure that was costly to maintain and inefficient in meeting modern demands.
• Need for Enhanced Performance and Agility: There was a common need to improve operational efficiency and rapidly deploy new features or services.

Unique Challenges and Solutions

• Challenge: Handling massive data and transaction volumes, particularly during peak seasons.
• Solution: Leveraging AWS’s scalable infrastructure to efficiently handle traffic spikes and manage data growth.
• Challenge: Adhering to strict financial regulatory requirements for data security and privacy.
• Solution: Utilizing Azure’s compliance offerings and advanced security features tailored for financial institutions.
• Challenge: Integrating various data sources and systems for a unified patient view, while complying with healthcare regulations.
• Solution: Adopting GCP’s healthcare-specific tools like the Healthcare API for seamless data integration and management, ensuring regulatory compliance.

Overall Benefits of Cloud Migration

• Cost Efficiency: All three organizations realized significant cost savings by reducing expenses related to maintaining physical data centers and legacy systems.
• Improved Security and Compliance: The cloud providers’ robust security features and adherence to industry-specific compliance standards addressed the organizations’ security concerns.
• Enhanced Scalability and Flexibility: The cloud environment enabled these organizations to scale resources as needed, accommodating growth and fluctuating demands.
• Data-Driven Insights and Decision Making: Improved data analytics capabilities facilitated by cloud services allowed for more informed decision-making and strategy development.
• Innovation and Enhanced Customer/Patient Experience: The agility afforded by the cloud enabled faster deployment of new services and applications, improving customer and patient experiences.

The comparative analysis of these case studies highlights how cloud migration, despite its challenges, offers substantial benefits across diverse sectors. While the specific challenges and solutions vary depending on the industry, the overarching advantages of improved efficiency, scalability, security, and innovation remain consistent. These case studies serve as compelling examples for other organizations considering cloud migration, demonstrating the transformative impact of cloud technology in modernizing and enhancing business operations.

AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd: Facilitating Successful Cloud Transformations

Introduction to and e-commerce pvt. ltd.

AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd is a burgeoning player in the field of cloud solutions and digital transformation services. As a company dedicated to helping businesses navigate the complexities of cloud migration and digital integration, AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd stands out for its comprehensive approach and commitment to client success. With a team of certified experts and a strong focus on leveraging the latest technologies, the company has established itself as a trusted partner for businesses looking to harness the power of the cloud.

Their Expertise in GCP, AWS, and Azure

AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd boasts a diverse team of professionals certified in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure. This wide-ranging expertise allows the company to provide tailored solutions that fit the unique needs of each client, regardless of the cloud platform they choose.

• GCP Expertise: Specializing in GCP, AND E-Commerce offers services ranging from cloud architecture design to data analytics and machine learning solutions on Google’s platform.
• AWS Proficiency: With AWS-certified professionals, the company excels in creating scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud solutions on AWS, catering to a wide range of industries.
• Azure Skills: The Azure team at AND E-Commerce is adept at harnessing the strengths of Microsoft’s cloud services, particularly for enterprises seeking integration with existing Microsoft products and services.

How They Assist Businesses in Cloud Transformation

AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd assists businesses in cloud transformation through a structured and client-centric approach:

• Consultation and Strategy Development: They begin with a comprehensive assessment of the client’s existing infrastructure, business goals, and specific challenges to develop a tailored cloud migration strategy.
• Customized Migration Plans: Understanding that each business has unique needs, the company crafts customized migration plans that minimize disruption and maximize efficiency.
• Implementation and Integration: AND E-Commerce manages the entire migration process, ensuring seamless integration of cloud services with existing business processes and systems.
• Continuous Support and Optimization: Post-migration, they provide ongoing support and optimization services to ensure that cloud infrastructures continue to meet the evolving needs of the business.

Services Offered and Unique Value Proposition

AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd offers a comprehensive suite of services:

• Cloud Migration and Management: From initial assessment to full-scale migration and ongoing management, they cover all aspects of cloud adoption.
• Data Analytics and Machine Learning: Leveraging cloud capabilities to provide advanced data analytics and machine learning services, helping clients gain deeper insights and competitive advantages.
• Security and Compliance: Offering robust security solutions tailored to each cloud platform, ensuring data protection and regulatory compliance.
• Custom Application Development: Developing cloud-native applications that are scalable, efficient, and aligned with business objectives.

The unique value proposition of AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd lies in its holistic approach, combining technical expertise with a deep understanding of business processes. This dual focus ensures that their cloud solutions not only meet technical requirements but also drive business growth and innovation.

AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd stands as a beacon for businesses looking to embark on or enhance their cloud journey. Their blend of expertise across major cloud platforms, commitment to tailored solutions, and focus on client success make them an ideal partner for companies seeking to leverage the benefits of cloud technology. Whether it’s through enhancing operational efficiency, enabling data-driven decision-making, or ensuring scalability and security, AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd is well-equipped to guide businesses through the transformative journey of cloud migration.

The case studies of the large retail corporation’s transition to AWS, the financial services company’s shift to Azure, and the healthcare provider’s move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) have illuminated the multifaceted nature of cloud migration. Each case presented unique challenges but also shared common difficulties such as data management, security, compliance, and the need for scalability and agility. The solutions tailored to each scenario showcased the versatility and robustness of cloud technology in addressing industry-specific needs. The overall benefits, including enhanced performance, cost efficiency, improved security, and innovation, underscore the transformative impact of cloud migration across various sectors.

The Future of Cloud Migration

The future of cloud migration looks promising and is poised to become more integral to business operations. As technology continues to evolve, cloud platforms are expected to offer even more advanced features and capabilities. This evolution will likely include enhanced artificial intelligence and machine learning functionalities, greater emphasis on cybersecurity, and more sophisticated tools for data analytics and integration. The trend towards multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies will likely grow, offering businesses more flexibility and customization options. Moreover, the increasing focus on sustainability in the tech industry might lead to cloud solutions that are not only efficient but also environmentally friendly.

Final Thoughts on the Role of Companies like AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd

In this evolving landscape, the role of companies like AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd becomes increasingly crucial. As cloud migration becomes more complex and integral to business success, the need for expert guidance and tailored solutions grows. Companies like AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd, with their expertise across various cloud platforms and commitment to customized service, are well-positioned to help businesses navigate this transition. They not only provide the technical know-how but also understand the business implications of cloud technology, ensuring that their clients not only migrate to the cloud but also thrive there.

In conclusion, cloud migration is not just a trend but a fundamental shift in how businesses operate and compete in the digital age. With the right strategy and partnership, like that offered by AND E-Commerce Pvt. Ltd, organizations can harness the full potential of the cloud, paving the way for innovation, efficiency, and continued growth. As we move forward, the synergy between business needs and technological advancements will continue to shape the future of cloud computing, making it an exciting and pivotal area for businesses and service providers alike.

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Migrate ensures data governance in the cloud and expands its product’s capabilities

About Migrate

Migrate is a Brazilian company that issues and manages electronic tax documents for customers in Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Established in 2004, it now has 70 employees and 30,000+ end customers.

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About Avenue Code

Avenue Code is a software consultancy firm and a Google Cloud partner. It focuses on delivering development solutions, aiming toward digital transformation in every vertical through technical intelligence, collaborative troubleshooting capabilities, and professionalism.

With support from Avenue Code, the company migrated its structure to Google Cloud and improved asset management, increased customer retention, and enhanced its performance.

• 15%–20% in cost savings
• Improved data governance
• Ensured environment stability and accessibility
• Increased customer satisfaction

New server creation time cut from 24 hours to two minutes

Migrate is a Brazilian IT company that issues and manages electronic tax documents for customers in Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Established in 2004, it now has 70 employees and 30,000+ end customers. It also handles the issuance and automated capture of electronic service invoices (NFS-e) in more than 2,600 cities, in addition to other documents such as electronic invoices (NF-e), electronic bills of lading (CT-e), and tax-document electronic manifestos (MDF-e).

Through its services, the company delivers technology, performance, and security to its customers. Its biggest differentiator is its platform, InvoiCy, which enables integration with systems via APIs or desktop plugins, and allows for centralized document management.

Despite all the infrastructure in place to meet user demands, Migrate understands that tax invoicing is a highly critical process. As an operation that must work 24/7, the platform can never stop, meaning the environment’s stability is essential to ensure deliveries.

The main challenge facing the company was its SQL server, which it used to issue invoices and store XML files. This server was slow, unstable, and generated costs requiring increasingly large investments. Consequently, Migrate started assessing a few cloud solutions to see if they met its technical expectations.

“Google Cloud’s app suite, integrations, and management panel were all aspects we held in high regard, especially the cloud-native concept. Services providing stability and scalability, as well as many other possibilities, were factors that influenced our choice.”

Strategies for the migration journey

Avenue Code was the Google Cloud partner that supported the company throughout the migration process. The company’s entire infrastructure and SQL production servers were migrated to the public cloud. The project had to be completed quickly and, as far as Migrate was concerned, Avenue Code’s support was crucial, as it has experts whose wealth of knowledge allows them to intervene in every step of the process.

Therefore, the time spent honing the database architecture, optimizing performance, and importing 20 TB of data to Google Cloud was just three months, from July to September 2019. Including a planning period before execution, everything was completed in about four months.

Avenue Code created two apps in Dataflow for the project. The first was for migrating data from the old data center to an optimized structure in the cloud, and the second was for ensuring data integrity by verifying consistency in the source and target databases.

“We operate in a development environment. We create pipelines in Dataflow and run tests. Only then do we start the lift-and-shift to avoid impacting the customer’s business during migration. We’ve maintained the synchronization between the on-prem database and Google Cloud without any downtime.”

Currently, most of Migrate’s application is deployed in Compute Engine instances. Cloud Load Balancing is used to scale instances based on demand. Structured files, such as XML and JSON, are stored in Cloud Storage . App Engine resources are used to authenticate APIs and automate tasks.

Perceived results

Since the project was implemented, Migrate has noticed various benefits. The time needed to create a new server dropped from 24 hours to two minutes. Total environment costs were cut by 15%–20%. Moreover, data governance has improved, the environment is more stable and accessible, and the company can rely on automated service monitoring.

“The company has improved resource management, reaped the benefits from a modern, up-to-date environment, and gained access to horizontal scalability, support for high data volumes and new technologies,” says Caram.

The environment has also allowed for business development thanks to the wide breadth of Google Cloud tools, which enabled the creation of an extension layer with new features in InvoiCy, an expansion that allowed Migrate to serve customers in situations other than document issuance.

“We have a more robust solution and a reliable structure that suits the development of our product. We have also reached a service satisfaction level of 86, meaning excellent retention rates, according to the Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology. This is an optimal score tying in with our customers’ satisfaction.”

The company is now 100% in the cloud and issues 2 million documents every day. Currently, the computing environment management is a strong differentiator, aiming to streamline information management and monitor actions through automated parameters and alerts.

This is a significant gain for the company, which intends to reach its next goal soon: deploying artificial intelligence and data mining services. Once again, Migrate will count on its professional expertise and the facilities enabled by Avenue Code and Google Cloud for that purpose.

Cloud migration is the process of moving data, applications and workloads from an on-premises data center to a cloud-based infrastructure, or from one cloud environment to another, known as cloud-to-cloud migration.

A company might migrate to either a single cloud or multiple. They can use public cloud models, where services are delivered over the public internet, or private cloud models, with a secure, proprietary cloud infrastructure accessible only to them. Many organizations choose a  hybrid cloud environment, which combines public and private cloud services to create a single, flexible, cost-effective IT infrastructure that supports and automates workload management across cloud environments.

Multiclouds offer another option, which allows companies to migrate IT infrastructure by using multiple public cloud providers. Multiclouds can be as simple as using software as a service (SaaS) from different vendors to employ portability features across infrastructures. However, they often involve managing enterprise applications on platform as a service (PaaS) or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) across multiple cloud vendors—such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud® and Microsoft Azure—from a central console.

Strategic application modernization is one key to transformational success that can boost annual revenue and lower maintenance and running costs.

Achieve workplace flexibility with DaaS

There are different types of cloud migration, varying in terms of what is being migrated and where it is moving to:

This cloud migration is the process of moving all data, applications and services from on-premises data centers to a cloud provider’s servers. This process is generally extensive and requires thorough planning and testing to ensure efficient execution.

Hybrid cloud migration involves moving a portion of resources to public cloud while leaving others in on-premises data centers. This hybrid cloud scenario allows organizations to take advantage of current investments in on-premises infrastructure while also using the flexibility, efficiency, strategic value and other benefits of public cloud.

Enterprises also use hybrid cloud migration for data backup. In this case, a company backs up its private cloud resources on a public cloud as a mitigation technique when an attack or disaster renders an on-premises data center inoperable.

Organizations might move their resources from one public cloud to another for many reasons. These reasons include taking advantage of specific pricing models, security features or products (such as new AI or machine learning tools) or because of changes to company structure or service level agreements.  

Another option is to migrate specific workloads to the cloud. For example, an organization might choose to migrate certain databases or mainframes to the cloud as a way to capitalize on lower costs, or for more reliable performance, better security and other factors.

Cloud migration has become a modernization imperative for businesses looking to streamline IT operations, implement cost-saving measures and realize end-to-end digital transformation . Tech analysts predict that 75% of organizations will adopt cloud-based data infrastructure by 2026. 1

To ensure a successful transition, organizations should follow a well-defined workflow that focuses on comprehensive planning, execution and optimization.

The first step in the workflow is cloud migration planning , which includes clearly articulating the business case for the migration. After the team has established the reasons for the migration, it’s important thoroughly assess existing IT infrastructure , apps and data to identify what’s suitable for migration and to assess dependencies that require attention. In this phase, teams typically:

• List and categorize apps and data
• Analyze app dependencies and interdependencies
• Evaluate security and compliance requirements
• Assess performance and scalability needs
• Establish migration goals and priorities
• Identify potential migration challenges

When the assessment is complete, it’s time to select the cloud provider that best aligns with business needs. Some factors to consider:

• Provider compatibility with existing apps and data
• Service offerings, pricing models and support capabilities
• Data sovereignty and compliance considerations
• Scalability and availability of required resources
• Interoperability with existing systems

This process involves determining how apps, data and infrastructure are organized in the cloud environment. Key considerations include:

• Designing scalable and resilient cloud architectures
• Defining networking and security configurations
• Identifying appropriate cloud services and features
• Optimizing cost-efficiency and performance
• Ensuring data backup and disaster recovery mechanisms

In this stage, the team transfers the existing IT infrastructure to the new cloud environment. Depending on the migration strategy (such as lift-and-shift, replatforming or refactoring), the execution process involves:

• Setting up the target cloud environment
• Provisioning virtual machines, storage and network resources
• Replicating or migrating data to the cloud
• Deploying and configuring apps in the new cloud infrastructure

Rigorous testing is vital to ensuring the functionality of newly transferred apps and data. Many teams choose to conduct:

• Functional testing to validate application migration
• Performance and load testing to assess scalability and responsiveness
• Security testing to identify vulnerabilities and ensure compliance
• User acceptance testing to validate end-user experience

It’s also important to resolve any issues or bugs identified during the testing and validation process.

At this point, the focus shifts to optimizing the cloud resources and configurations. This step entails:

• Fine-tuning applications
• Installing the necessary security measures and access controls
• Setting up monitoring and alerting mechanisms
• Streamlining resource usage
• Establishing governance and management processes

But cloud adoption isn’t a single-step process. Massive infrastructure and data transfers require continuous, real-time performance monitoring to really optimize the features of the new cloud infrastructure and ensure the long-term success of the migration. Organizations should be prepared to update or upgrade software and security protocols, scale up or down based on demand patterns, and monitor cloud costs to optimize cost-effectiveness.

Successful cloud migration requires a comprehensive strategy that lays out migration goals and anticipates challenges. For instance, legacy applications in an organization’s network might not be optimized for the cloud, so they must be prepared for the process with migration tools and approaches designed for the task.

Migration strategy should account for workloads that move to the cloud, the workloads that stay within the on-premises infrastructure, and any new capabilities or applications the team should add after the migration is complete. The migration plan should also include roadmaps, timelines, project metrics and goals, and a strategy for relaying information to team leaders, cloud vendors and other stakeholders.

While each company’s exact approach will vary based on their circumstances and cloud service needs, there are some tried-and-true cloud migration strategies that can streamline the process.

Typically the quickest and least complex migration approach, rehosting (also called lift-and-shift) involves migrating applications and data from onsite infrastructure to a cloud platform without making significant changes to the architecture, likely by using IaaS tools. However, this transfer strategy doesn’t fully take advantage of cloud-native features, so it’s best for applications that aren’t tightly coupled to the underlying infrastructure.

A replatforming (also known as lift-and-reshape) cloud strategy attempts to use some cloud-native features while maintaining compatibility by making specific, but minimal, changes to the existing IT architecture. A few examples of cloud-native features include  microservice architecture, Kubernetes containers and  machine learning models. 

A refactoring, or rearchitecting, approach requires the organization to redesign and redevelop applications by using a PaaS tool to fully use cloud-native capabilities. Since it often requires significant changes to existing architecture, it tends to make data migration more scalable, resilient and efficient in the cloud environment. Refactoring allows businesses to maximize the business value of cloud systems and use modern architectural patterns and models, such as microservices and serverless computing.

The repurchasing strategy involves retiring an existing application and replacing it with a SaaS alternative. Instead of migrating the application to the cloud, businesses opt for a cloud-based SaaS system that meets their needs. This approach provides instant access to cloud-based applications without the need for significant development efforts. Repurchasing can be useful for transferring non-core applications like email, customer relationship management  and human resources management.

Finally, to implement a retiring approach, businesses must decommission outdated and unused applications. As part of the migration process, teams identify extraneous applications or systems and shut them down, reducing maintenance costs, eliminating redundant resources and streamlining the migration process by focusing only on critical applications.

Be sure to cover specific use cases (for example, mission-critical enterprise applications,  data backup and recovery , productivity or collaboration applications, software development projects) for the workloads you’re migrating. Defining use cases up front enables better strategy decisions and smoother execution.

Companies worldwide are embracing cloud migration for the various benefits that cloud computing offers. Here are just a few ways that an organization can benefit from cloud migration:

Because cloud-based infrastructure removes many of the physical and financial obstacles to scalability (for example, data center infrastructure, or onsite server maintenance), it enables businesses to easily upscale or downscale their IT requirements when necessary.

Cloud services let businesses subscribe to workload management services on a pay-as-you-go basis. Instead of adding onsite capacity to anticipate future needs, companies can pay for the capacity they need now and scale on demand. Cloud services also help lower costs associated with setting up and running onsite data centers, which often require hefty hardware and utility expenditures and a large network of servers.

Although no system is foolproof, cloud service providers implement extensive measures to protect sensitive data, and comply with industry standards and government regulations. Security tools and protocols can protect cloud environments and cloud environments can automate software and security updates, measures that reduce security risk. 2

Furthermore, cloud migration helps ensure data safety. In the event of a disaster, cloud infrastructure facilitates data recovery and helps maintain business continuity with minimal downtime, latency issues or data loss.

Migrating applications to the cloud empowers businesses to adopt new technologies faster and enables affordable, just-in-time technology adoption in response to new business opportunities.

For instance, if a retail company wants to introduce an AI-driven recommendation system to its online store without cloud infrastructure, the company must make considerable hardware investments. These investments include the cost of purchasing, installing and maintaining on-premises infrastructure, and hiring personnel to manage it. It would also take quite a while to get the new infrastructure up and running. With a cloud-based infrastructure, the company might install the new AI system, at scale, within minutes, significantly reducing the time between decision-making and implementation.

The Instana Observability platform provides real-time performance data that helps businesses optimize their hybrid cloud networks and make the most of cloud migration investments. 

The IBM Turbonomic platform provides cloud migration planning that allows you to optimize your cloud consumption from the start and simplify your cloud migration process.

IBM Consulting® cloud migration services help manage cloud migration for your business, allowing you to focus on everything else.

Before embarking on the cloud migration process, use these six steps to gain a clear understanding of what’s involved to successfully migrate applications to the cloud.

Based on research from Forrester, this report will help your business start the modernization journey with migration to the cloud.

See how a combination of observable IT components, machine learning and AI makes it possible to recognize brewing software problems before they become incidents.

IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are the three most popular types of cloud service offerings. They are sometimes referred to as cloud service models or cloud computing service models.

Application migration is the process of moving a software application from one computing environment to another.

Lift and shift is the process of migrating an exact copy of an application or workload, together with its data store and OS, from one environment to another.

IBM Turbonomic allows you to run applications seamlessly, continuously and cost-effectively to help achieve efficient app performance while lowering costs.

1 “ Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Reach Nearly USD 600 Billion in 2023 ” (link resides outside ibm.com), Gartner, 19 April 2023

2 “ Understanding Patches and Software Updates ” (link resides outside ibm.com), CISA, 23 February 2023

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Chris Stokel-Walker

Case studies in cloud migration: netflix, pinterest, and symantec.

In October 2008, Neil Hunt, chief product officer at Netflix, gathered a meeting of a dozen or so of his engineering staffers in The Towering Inferno, the secluded top-floor meeting room at Netflix’s Los Gatos, CA headquarters. The room, which Netflix CEO Reed Hastings occasionally commandeers as his personal office, is away from the main office hustle and bustle of the start-up company, up a flight of stairs and across an outdoor wooden walkway up on the building’s rooftop—the ideal place for big-picture thinking.

Big thoughts were needed, because Netflix had a problem: its backend client architecture was, to put none too fine a term on it, crumbling more than the Colosseum and leaning more than the Tower of Pisa.

“We kept having issues with connections and threads,” Hunt  recalled  at an industry conference in Las Vegas, NV, six years later. “At one point we upgraded the machine to a fantastic $5 million box and it crashed immediately because the extra capacity on the thread pools meant we ran out of connection pools more quickly.”

It was an unenviable position to be in for the firm, which had introduced online streaming of its vast video library the year before. Netflix had just partnered with Microsoft to get its app on the Xbox 360, and had agreed to terms with the manufacturers of Blu-ray players and TV set-top boxes to service their customers. Millions of potential users of a new, game-changing technology were about to encounter what we now know as the multi-billion dollar industry of online video streaming that would transform Netflix from a failing company that mailed DVDs to movie buffs into a television and movie studio that rivaling some of Hollywood’s biggest names.

But, back in 2008, with a backend that couldn’t cope, the public wasn’t about to encounter anything—unless Netflix made some changes.

There were two points of failure in the physical technology, Hunt explained to the conference audience in Las Vegas: The disk array that ran Netflix’s database—a single Oracle database on an array of Blade webservers—and the single box that talked to it.

“We knew we were approaching a point where we needed to make this redundant,” said Hunt. But Netflix hadn’t yet forked out the cash for second data center that would alleviate the problem. “We were vulnerable to those single points of failure.”

“Let’s rethink this completely, go back to first principles, and think about doing it in the cloud.”

That much became abundantly clear in 2008 when the company pushed a piece of firmware to the disk array. It corrupted Netflix’s database, and the company had to spend three days scrambling to recover. (One contemporary news story on the outage—and the customer outrage it sparked—noted that some customers even went back to Blockbuster, which Netflix had made seem decrepit, for their DVDs.) “That wasn’t a total catastrophe because most customers weren’t reliant on the system being up to get value from the service,” explained Hunt—but as Netflix’s DVD mailing arm wound down and its new streaming service caught on, it would become a problem.

“We thought: ‘Let’s rethink this completely, go back to first principles, and think about doing it in the cloud’,” said Hunt.

Over the course of several meetings in The Towering Inferno, Hunt and his team thrashed out a plan that would ensure that database corruption—and the many other issues with connections and threads that seemed to plague the company back in 2008—would never happen again. They’d move to the cloud.

Whether companies are looking to run their applications serving millions of users or to underpin the databases and file servers of multinational businesses, the cloud provides a low-cost, flexible way to ensure reliable IT resources. Firms don’t need to worry about the physical upkeep of their own private data centers storing information; they can build out capacity as and when it’s needed, lowering costs and increasing their adaptability—important features for a young startup with unpredictable (and potentially limitless) growth. It has been a recent boon, born out by technological innovation, that helps power hundreds of thousands of companies, big and small, across the globe.

For Netflix, the move to the cloud proved a prescient decision: between December 2007 and December 2015, the number of hours of content streamed on Netflix increased one thousand times, and the company had eight times as many people signed up to the service at the end of its cloud migration process as it did at the start. Cloud infrastructure was able to stretch to meet this expanding demand while traditional server racks in a data center were not able to (the number of requests per month called through Netflix’s API  outstripped  the capacity of its traditional data center near the end of 2010). It also proved to be a major cost-saving move.

But at the same time, the cloud was still an unproven, young technology. Amazon, the current leader in cloud computing, had only been offering their Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure products since 2006. Caution was required. Netflix started small, moving over a single page onto AWS to make sure the new system worked. “It’s nicely symbolic,” said Hunt. “We recognised that along the way we probably need to hire some new skills, bring in some new talent, and rethink our organisation.” The company chose AWS over alternative public cloud suppliers because of its breadth of features and its scale, as well as the broader variants of APIs that AWS offered.

“When Netflix made the decision to go all-in on the cloud, most people were barely aware the cloud existed.”

Today, the cloud is many companies’ first choice when it comes to storing data and serving their customers. AWS is a $12 billion company, four times bigger than it was in 2013. It has—and has long had—a 40% market share in the public cloud sector, much more than the combined market share of Microsoft, Google and IBM’s cloud offerings combined,  according to data  collated by Synergy Research Group. Those that aren’t utilising the cloud often feel they want to, and are frustrated when they can’t: Four in 10 businesses have critical company data trapped in legacy systems that can’t be accessed or linked to cloud services, according to a survey by market research company Vanson Bourne for commercial software company Snaplogic, while three in four say that their organization misses out on opportunities because of disconnected data. Vendors’ revenue from the sales of infrastructure products—including server, storage and Ethernet switches—for cloud IT topped $8 billion in the first quarter of 2017, according to analysts IDC.

But none of that was the case when Netflix started its great migration, nor was it true when Ruslan Meshenberg started at Netflix in January 2011, two years into Netflix’s big move. As one of the first companies to move its services into the cloud, Netflix was literally writing the rulebook for many of the tasks it was undertaking. Meshenberg was thrown in at the deep end.

“That was the very first set of objectives I was given,” he explains. “A complete data-center-to-cloud migration for a core set of platform services. Day one.”

It involved a lot of outside the box thinking—and plenty of trailblazing. “When Netflix made the decision to go all-in on the cloud, most people were barely aware the cloud existed,” he explains. “We had to find solutions to a lot of problems, at a time when there were not a lot of standard, off-the-shelf solutions.”

And the problems, when tackling such an enormous task as the migration of a company the size of Netflix, were numerous—particularly for a team used to the mindset that their system operated in a physical data center.

“When you’re operating in a data center,” says Meshenberg, “you know all of your servers. Your applications are running only on a particular set of hardware units.” The goal for the company in a physical data center is a simple one: keep the hardware running at all times, at all costs. That’s not the case with the cloud. Your software runs on ephemeral instances that aren’t guaranteed to be up for any particular duration, or at any particular time. “You can either lament that ephemerality and try to counteract it, or you can try and embrace it and say: ‘I’m going to build a reliable, available system on top of something that is not.’”

Which is where Netflix’s famed  Simian Army  comes in. You have to build a system that can fail—in part—while keeping up as a whole. But in order to figure out if your systems have that ability baked into their design, you need to test it.

Netflix built a tool that would self-sabotage its system, and christened it Chaos Monkey. It would be unleashed on the cloud system, wreaking havoc, bringing down aspects of the system as it rampaged around. The notion might seem self-defeating, but it had a purpose. “We decided to simulate the conditions of a crash to make sure that our engineers can architect, write and test software that’s resilient in light of these failures,” explains Meshenberg.

In its early days, Chaos Monkey’s tantrums in the cloud were a dispiriting experience. “It was painful,” Meshenberg admits. “We didn’t have the best practices, and so many of our systems failed in production. But now, since our engineers have this built-in expectation that our systems will have to be tested by Chaos Monkey, in production they’re now writing their software using the best practices that can withstand such destructive testing.”

Even without Chaos Monkey, there were still early setbacks, including a significant outage across North America on Christmas Eve 2012 thanks to an AWS update to elastic load balancers that tipped Netflix offline—a chastening event. But the company adapted, and came through it. By 2015 all of Netflix’s systems—bar its customer and employee data management databases, and billing and payment components—had been migrated to AWS. It would take a little longer before Meshenberg’s team could celebrate a job complete, but the relatively bump-free path (and the easy scaling up of systems as Netflix’s customer base skyrocketed) vindicated the move.

“The crux of our decision to go into the cloud,” says Meshenberg, was a simple one: “It wasn’t core to our business to build and operate data centers. It’s not something our users get value from. Our users get value from enjoying their entertainment. We decided to focus on that and push the underlying infrastructure to a cloud provider like AWS.”

For Netflix, dipping their toe into the water of cloud computing wasn’t an option. They had to dive in headfirst.

That said, making the leap was a brave move—not least given that, particularly when Netflix began its migration in 2009 and even when Meshenberg joined the company in 2011, cloud storage was still a relatively unknown technology in the Valley, and an unknown term to the general public. (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)  held  just its fourth ever international conference on cloud computing in Washington DC in 2011; technology analysts Gartner were still able, back in 2011, to  publish  a $2,000 “Hype Cycle” report explaining a technology that was on the rise.) Though those in the know understood the benefits of migrating to the cloud, and had a hunch that the general consensus would follow them, early adopters were still just that—pioneers pushing out the boundaries for the technology.

Going all-in on the cloud required betting on the future—and hoping that others would follow. But for Netflix, dipping their toe into the water of cloud computing wasn’t an option. They had to dive in headfirst.

“We had little doubt that cloud was the future,” explains Meshenberg. “If it was, it didn’t make sense to hedge our bets and straddle both worlds, because that would mean we would lose the focus of getting something done completely to the end.”

There was another factor in the decision for Netflix, too: scalability. “Our business was growing a lot faster than we would be able to build the capacity ourselves,” Meshenberg recalls. “Every time you grow your business your traffic grows by an order of magnitude, you have to rewrite the rules. The thing that worked for you at a smaller scale may no longer work at the bigger scale. We made a bet that the cloud would be a sufficient means in terms of capacity and capability to support our business, and the rest was figuring out the technical details of how.”

For Raj Patel, considering anything but the cloud was never really an option. Head of Cloud Engineering at Pinterest from 2014–2016, Patel joined a company that still had to engineer another move: from Amazon Web Service’s legacy cloud to a next-generation cloud system. “It wasn’t any different, frankly, than moving from a data center to the public cloud,” explains Patel. “We did a migration inside of Amazon.”

The move was one that some at the startup were wary of, even despite its benefits. “A cloud migration, in many cases, doesn’t necessarily get them anything,” says Patel. “The appeal has to be why they should do this before the five other things they were thinking about doing for their own group.”

At a small, nimble startup like Pinterest, time and resources are scarce, and an engineering team’s to-do list is as long as the sum of their collective arms. Getting people on-side with the cloud migration required deftness, discussion—and categorically not a top-down edict. It also required going person-to-person, winning small victories in support of the larger battle.

“You have to intuitively appeal or influence the motivations of an individual engineer to achieve your goal,” says Patel. “What I found was that at the earlier stages of the program I explicitly looked for folks that are early adopters or have a vested interest in doing that program or project, and you really focus on making them really successful. Then if the others see it they’ll get on board.”

Certain groups at Pinterest had pent-up frustrations with the older generation of Amazon’s cloud service, particularly when it same to the elasticity of potential future expansion. Data engineering-intensive applications ran up against walls with the old cloud server. Patel saw an in.

“We focused on those who would benefit the most,” he says, selling them on the idea of migrating over to a new cloud server, better equipped to deal with the developments they wanted to introduce. Patel’s team provided those early adopters with the tools to help them smoothly migrate over to the new cloud. That included embedding a consultant or solution engineer (rebranded “site reliability engineers” so as not to ruffle any feathers within the groups they joined) with each application team, who was able to provide the relevant tools and know-how to help ease the transition over to AWS. What the site reliability engineers from Patel’s team didn’t do, though, was impose any ideas or tools on the teams they joined.

"We focused on those who would benefit the most,” selling them on the idea of migrating over to a new cloud server, better equipped to deal with the developments they wanted to introduce.

“Any time you do a cloud migration—especially with engineers—there’s always this notion of: ‘Here’s my way of doing it, here’s your way of doing it: What’s the right way of doing it?’,” explains Patel. “If you had an outside group tell you this is the only way you’re going to do it, you’re going to run into a lot of friction.”

Rather, the teams worked collaboratively, engendering a sense of common purpose. Pinterest was, in truth, always going to make the move, and the company could have become forceful with its ideas, but Patel wanted a more consensual approach. “Their success is embedded with that application team,” says Patel. “Even though they might be talking about a central tool or approach, they’re perceived from the perspective of that application team.”

Like a pyramid scheme, the early adopters found success, and became proselytisers for the move. “When they talk to others at lunch, they say the migration is going really well; the guys doing it are really helpful, and it’s going just fantastic,” says Patel. “The next time you talk to the sceptics, they say: ‘Let’s go and do it.’”

At the same time, those systems that had successfully made the cloud-to-cloud migration were crowed about internally. Data democracy was crucial, says Patel, in getting across the message that the migration was something to be welcomed, not shunned. “We had important metrics about the progress we were making and would send it out to the whole engineering team to let them see it,” he explains. “People like data—engineers especially. They resonate with that progress.”

Six months later, Pinterest had transferred its backend to the more modern cloud system. The team held a party to celebrate the successful move, but truthfully, it was just another success for a company that has plenty of them.

“Think about it,” says Patel. “This was a company that was doubling or tripling in size every year. When I joined the company it was making $0 in revenue and the first year it was $100 million or something, then the next year something like three times that amount. That was the norm across the entire company. In some ways, it was just business as usual.”

When Patel moved to Symantec in April 2016 to become vice president for cloud platform engineering, things were far from business as usual.

“The magnitude of challenges are, I’d say, 5× with Symantec,” he explains. “That’s one of the things I’ve come to realize: While it’s interesting to talk about companies like Pinterest, Facebook or Instagram, their problem is already solved. They have some of the brightest engineers in the world, their applications are already designed for these cloud-type elastic architectures. In some ways, the challenge is not that interesting. But when you’re dealing with a 30-plus year-old company like Symantec, the challenge is a lot more interesting.”

For decades, Symantec had provided stability and assurance to customers—important, given its role as a security service. Unlike Pinterest, which was born in the cloud seven years ago, Symantec was founded in 1982, when computers were massive, hulking bits of hardware, hardwired to the wall. The company had been in business before the world wide web appeared as long as Pinterest has been in business, period. A publicly listed company—accountable to shareholders, with $3.6 billion of turnover—comes with more levels of hierarchy than a nimble, community-focused startup born in the Valley.

“There are more business units with general managers, instead of application teams,” explains Patel. “All those barriers are a lot more rigid in a larger enterprise than they are in the more nimble, engineering organisation approach you find in a startup.” There are also people who have been working in the company longer than some of Pinterest’s brightest young engineers—individuals who have decades of experience, and rightly should be listened to when they pass comment on the merits of such a move into the cloud. “Frankly, there were a lot of sceptics, and real architectural challenges in applications that simply have not been designed for the cloud,” says Patel. His work would end up closing down 27 separate data centers around the world and moving everything into the public cloud. The scale seemed almost insurmountable.

Even the business case for convincing staff at Symantec was more difficult; it simply wasn’t as easy an argument to make, because if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

“Your influencing job is probably 5× harder,” says Patel. “Because of the cultural transformation, you have to be a lot more convincing. You’re telling people to work differently which is very difficult, and sometimes the organization has the appetite to do those things, and sometimes they don’t.”

Much like Ruslan Meshenberg felt the need to win over his staff members, and just as Patel had to leverage the enthusiasm of early adopters at Pinterest to convince those who were less keen on taking the leap into the cloud, at Symantec Patel had to undergo a similar “hearts and minds” campaign.

Guided by Patel’s boss, the executive vice president of the sector, his team decided to show, not tell, fellow Symantec staffers about the benefits of cloud migration. “We took all the major classes of application and did a proof of concept for each one of them,” he explains. Patel’s team broke down the challenge, piece by piece, drawing up a technical feasibility study for each application, working with each group’s architect, building a proof of concept that could convince them such a move would work— “as opposed to saying: ‘We’re just going to run off this cliff and it’s going to work.’”

The attitude was a simple one: “Let’s remove the risk, and show that.”

It worked. Conviction built around the move; the only thing left to discuss was how exactly to handle the migration.

Big legacy companies planning a move to the cloud are faced with one of two options: They can go down the lift-and-shift path, or the fix-and-shift route.

The lift-and-shift route is the (comparatively) easy option. You take your pre-existing application as it presently works in a private data center, and make the minimum possible changes before moving it into the cloud. “I understand there’s going to be benefits to moving to the cloud, and I’m probably not going to realise most of them, but we’ll fix it later,” says Patel of the lift-and-shift approach.

Fix-and-shift is harder, but potentially more beneficial. You’re not just going to do the bare minimum work to ensure your application—which worked fine in an offline data center—will work in the cloud. You’re buying into the concept of moving to the cloud, fixing your culture along the way, and making it more adaptable to the new norm.

“A lot of the time what you’ll find is that traditional IT organisations tend to do lift-and-shift,” says Patel. “They’re taking the same thing they had in their private data centres and, whether it’s a corporate mandate or whatever, they say: ‘Let’s just go and move it to the cloud.’ They’re looking for roughly the same technical or organisational approaches to operating in the cloud before the cloud,” he adds. “And in my view, that’s why a lot of those efforts fail.”

It was the same choice that Neil Hunt and his team had considered back in The Towering Inferno conference room. “We could take the existing app, forklift it, and shove it into AWS, then start to chip away at it,” he explained. “That was unappealing. It would be easy to do but we’d bring along a lot of bad architecture and a lot of bad habits.”

Netflix’s second choice was equally unappealing at first glance, simply because of the scale of the task. “We would run our existing infrastructure, and side by side run our AWS infrastructure, and migrate one piece at a time, from one system to another.” As the cloud migration occurred, Netflix totally transformed. Its application also changed from a hulking, single monolithic application to a clutch of small microservices, each of which can be developed independent of the others. It recast the way the company thought about everything, completely changing the shape and makeup of the firm.

Years after Netflix’s brave decision to undergo the wholesale application and infrastructure refactor, Symantec came to the same decision: They’re fixing, then they’re shifting. Patel still has a way to go before he can breathe easily: The process has taken—and will take—time, but he’s hopeful about reaching the finish line that lingers temptingly on the horizon.

“I’ll personally feel a lot more excitement when we’re done here at Symantec, just because we’ll have done so much more organisationally,” he explains.

Patel already knows the jubilation that’s felt when you move an entire company into the cloud, and can’t wait to feel that again. For Ruslan Meshenberg, who had helped guide Netflix into the cloud without any major hitches, there was only one way to celebrate the achievement. It’s what Silicon Valley does best: Hold an amazing party.

“We had some fun, and we shared some battle stories,” says Meshenberg. The team shared a sense of achievement—personally and as a group. “Cloud migration involves every single person in a company, whether they’re engineering or not,” he adds.

Meshenberg, who had only known cloud migration in his time with the company, could move on from the project he was handed on the first day of his job, to task number two. It must’ve seemed easy-going in comparison, you’d think. “Relatively speaking,” he agrees — “but probably not less challenging. The only constant is change itself. Nothing stands still. We have to constantly re-evaluate our assumptions and ensure that our ecosystem evolves as well.”

“Cloud migration involves every single person in a company, whether they’re engineering or not.”

But Meshenberg still holds with him that sense of pride that his team and colleagues pulled off a major cloud migration without much of a hitch—and that they confounded the critics along the way, remaining ahead of the technical curve.

“When we went into the cloud we faced a lot of external scepticism, people saying this will never work, or that it may work but not for us,” he says. “It might not be secure enough, scalable enough—you name it.”

There’s a brief pause, a moment as Meshenberg collects his thoughts. Eventually, he comes out with 10 short words: “It was good to be able to get it done.”

About the author

Chris Stokel-Walker is a UK-based features journalist for The Economist , Bloomberg , the BBC, and Wired UK . His first book, YouTubers , was published in 2019, and his second, TikTok Boom, was published in July 2021.

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Call for change

Migrating core enterprise systems to the cloud is one of the biggest tests an IT organization will ever face. In many cases, it’s critical to improve system agility, enhance enterprise security, and deliver a more sustainable and flexible cost structure. Yet, at the same time, it is fraught with risk, given the many unknowns often buried in the legacy environment.

Accenture Federal Services (Accenture) geared up for its internal cloud migration, but—sure enough—along the journey, an unforeseen twist occurred that raised the stakes dramatically. The company—whose clients include all US federal cabinet-level agencies—had charged its IT team with migrating its entire financial management suite to the cloud. By rearchitecting the system in a cloud environment, the company would improve manageability and streamline integration with the many third-party applications reliant on this system of record. While at the same time, moving systems and data responsible for continuous billing, payments, payroll, and reporting presented business continuity risks.

As Accenture was about to embark on this 18-month cloud-migration journey, it learned that the company was given six months’ notice to vacate its existing data center. Because the migration was a carefully orchestrated process—developed in partnership with finance, human resources, and security colleagues—accelerating the move was not a certainty.

The team quickly called up its contingency plan and immediately updated its requirements, weighing the different degrees of risk and levels of support required for planning. What was on Accenture’s updated “must have list” for this environment? Increased flexibility, greater resource availability, enhanced security, and reduced costs, to name a few needs. After careful assessment, the company set out on the migration path on a highly expedited timeline.

When tech meets human ingenuity

It is tempting to consider cloud migration as an IT project, but fundamentally cloud migration is about serving the priority needs of the business, and often IT must work in lockstep with other functions to ensure 24/7 continuity of service to its customers. A project of this scale and at this speed requires a shared sense of purpose, and a shared commitment to practical matters, such as what to move first.

Application rationalization and inventory management is a critical first step to mitigating risk. Architects can develop an effective migration that eliminates redundancies, simplifies integration, and ensures that the new environment is provisioned appropriately by carefully assessing where functionality and data reside, how they are integrated, and how they are secured.

With a detailed reskilling and change management program in place, employees were able to quickly transition to new roles.

The Accenture team confirmed backup implementations were effectively in place should they be required to roll back the proposed migration, as part of contingency planning and due diligence.

Having this type of recovery in place was critical given the stakes—the company’s financial integrity. Like many organizations around the world, the team also had to grapple with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, which emerged during the migration. Issues such as new travel restrictions, safety protocols, and supply chain disruptions required more adaptive planning. For example, hardware limitations created the need to repurpose existing components.

In addition to redeploying systems and data, Accenture needed a plan for reassigning the highly experienced workforce. While these workers were eager to embrace new roles and skillsets, the company needed to invest in new career paths, training, and operating models to enable this shift.

That foresight paid off: With a detailed reskilling and change management program in place, employees were able to quickly transition to new roles, in many cases shifting their focus from simply managing workloads to optimizing performance.

A valuable difference

Following a detailed migration plan and with continued vigilance to potential disruptions, the Accenture team was able to complete the migration on time and on budget—a staggering pace for a migration of this scale. What this success reinforces is the need to carefully plan each phase of the journey (including the workforce), collaborate with all associated functions, and have an operating model in place for the new environment. And, do not omit a carefully-crafted contingency plan.

System users are already reaping the rewards of Accenture’s new cloud-based systems in terms of flexibility, resource availability, enhanced security, cost savings and beyond. Migrating the entire financial suite en masse—that included enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise data warehouse (EDW), reporting, and analytics—enabled faster, more responsive processes, which reduced system processing times. This allowed more time for the business to complete complex analyses during monthly and quarterly close processes.

From an enterprise perspective, the key benefits of the end-to-end transformation are wide-ranging:

Cloud-native security components and automated refreshes allow Accenture to manage cyber activities in days versus months.

Data recovery and time to recover improved by 50% immediately by using cloud infrastructure, allowing for same-day business continuity of systems.

The cloud environment allows for rapid response to incidents and 5x faster recovery, given the integrated use of cloud automation.

Opportunity

People had continuous training and skills development with this project, allowing them to take on new roles where they can have a bigger impact.

The cloud-based system can be provisioned to business requirements. Using the cloud cut our on-site footprint and extended hardware refresh timelines.

"A move to the cloud is inevitable for most enterprises, but a successful implementation isn’t a given, migration isn’t just a technology issue." — Chris Bjornson , Accenture Federal Services’ CIO during the migration

Accenture is using this cloud migration experience to develop its suite of FedRAMP-authorized cloud platforms, its role as an accredited FedRAMP Third Party Assessment Organization (3PAO) , and in helping federal clients plan and execute their own cloud journeys.

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Cloud-migration opportunity: Business value grows, but missteps abound

By 2024, most enterprises aspire to have $8 out of every $10 for IT hosting go toward the cloud, including private cloud, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). Achieving that aspiration will require significant effort from both enterprises and technology providers.

The COVID-19 pandemic is one factor driving the ambitious goal, as it triggered the need to speed the pace of enterprise digitization. But the more significant catalyst is the $1 trillion in business value  that cloud adoption can unlock. Some organizations, however, are leaking their share of that value instead of capturing it, with inefficiencies in orchestrating cloud migrations adding unexpected cost and delays. Approximately $100 billion of wasted migration spend is expected over the next three years, and most enterprises cite the costs around migration as a major inhibitor to adopting the cloud.

But not everyone is suffering these growing pains. A McKinsey survey of nearly 450 chief information officers (CIOs) and IT decision makers globally finds that a subset of organizations has shifted a majority of IT hosting to the cloud on time and on budget. This article reveals the aspirations and hurdles that business leaders are facing in their journey to the cloud—and what outperforming organizations are doing right.

Businesses that follow the lead of cloud-migration outperformers stand to unlock some $1 trillion in value.

Businesses were embracing the cloud even before the COVID-19 crisis, but the pandemic lent new urgency to its use. At one fast-casual-restaurant chain, for example, the number of online orders jumped to 400,000 per day, from 50,000. That volume would have overwhelmed the company’s legacy infrastructure, but the business had transitioned its e-commerce and online-ordering system to the cloud before pandemic-related lockdowns occurred. Having seen the benefits, leaders in the company now plan to compress their five-year migration plan to less than one year.

That company is not alone. Two years ago, legacy infrastructure accounted for the lion’s share of the average IT-hosting budget. At that time, enterprises set an aspiration to move around 45 percent of their IT-hosting spend to the cloud by 2021. But nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of surveyed decision makers say their organizations increased their cloud budgets as a result of the pandemic, and 55 percent moved more workloads than initially planned. With the cloud having proven its value, 40 percent of companies expect to pick up the pace of their implementations going forward.

Looking forward, leaders remain bullish. Our data show that by 2024, the average company aspires to have cloud spend represent 80 percent of its total IT-hosting budget.

Capturing value in the cloud

Hosting industry-specific applications on the cloud has growing appeal for businesses across sectors. Between 2021 and 2024, public-cloud spend on vertical applications (such as warehouse management in retail and enterprise risk management in banking) is set to grow by more than 40 percent annually, compared with around 25 percent for horizontal workloads (such as customer relationship management). And in healthcare and manufacturing, organizations plan to spend around twice as much on vertical applications than on horizontal ones.

The benefits for cloud-base vertical applications can be transformative. An apparel retailer moved its e-commerce application to SaaS so that it could expand into multiple international markets at once, a shift its homegrown system could not accommodate without a major rebuild. Avoiding custom development saved cost, time, and complexity and, because key competitors lacked a similarly robust e-commerce presence, the retailer could grow share faster, increasing its international revenues by more than 30 percent year on year.

Although companies are transitioning more workloads to the public cloud, missteps in coordinating the migration are taking a toll. Data show that those inefficiencies are costing the average company 14 percent more in migration spend than planned each year, and 38 percent of companies have seen their migrations delayed by more than one quarter.

When the 14 percent in unanticipated cloud-migration spend is tallied globally, the price tag is eye opening. Cost overruns at a global level add up to well more than $100 billion in wasted spend over the course of migration in three years. Left unchecked, those costs of moving workloads to the cloud could wipe out more than $500 billion in shareholder value over the same period.

A global pharmaceutical company sought to move nearly all its workloads to the cloud. At the end of 12 months, however, it had shifted only 40 percent of its first-year target. Overwhelmed, the company cut the scope of its cloud-adoption plans by roughly 50 percent and chose to retire more applications rather than move them. With the program now more than three quarters behind plan and costing 50 percent more than budgeted, the company hopes that with the right incentives in place, its systems-integrator (SI) partners will be motivated by the increased spend to accelerate the migration.

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Today the average company staffs around 35 percent of its cloud needs in house. To meet companies’ cloud ambitions, however, most hope to bring that number up to roughly 50 percent by 2024. That means organizations around the world will be looking to hire or reskill at least one million new cloud developers over the next three years. That demand is likely to exacerbate already tight talent supplies.

External labor is a way to fill the void, but some companies engage SIs without thinking through the best way to structure that partnership. Lacking in-house enterprise-architecture expertise, for example, a global pharmaceutical company turned its cloud migration almost entirely over to SIs. But because the SIs’ fees were based on time spent rather than on performance outcomes, they had little incentive to speed the migration, with the result that some projects took far longer than planned and cost more than budgeted. Across our study, spending on SIs was the most cited cost overrun outside of change management.

While most companies struggle with implementation delays, our study found that a subset—15 percent of the total sample—succeeded in migrating more than 60 percent of their IT-hosting spend to the cloud and did so within the timeline they set.

Analysis shows that those outperforming companies are 32 percent more likely than others to have active CEO sponsors. They are 9 percent more likely to develop the full implementation road map, including the security and compliance framework, up front rather than funding a series of one-off initiatives. And they are 57 percent more likely to hire for advanced skill sets (such as DevOps and FinOps). As important, they are also more decisive in pulling the plug on data-center funding to galvanize the cloud migration, even if it means paying early termination fees.

For example, at one consumer-packaged-goods company, the CEO pressed the case for cloud adoption, setting the top-down strategy and communicating with the entire company in written updates and town halls. Employees knew that the cloud strategy had the CEO’s direct support. As the company’s head of IT told us, “It’s not enough to have the CIO on board; you need CEO and board-level support to provide ‘air cover.’ It’s important to know that they have your back when you engage with others in the business.”

A path forward

Businesses can set their cloud migrations on a stronger foundation by following the example of outperformers. But providers and partners must do their part as well. Cloud-service providers should make value creation, not consumption, a core metric, and SIs and channel partners need to adapt their recipes for success, since the results of our study show that the approaches used for on-site implementations are not scaling effectively to the cloud.

Cloud-service providers that focus on value creation as a core metric can help businesses set a strong foundation in their cloud-migration efforts.

Tara Balakrishnan is an alumna of McKinsey’s Seattle office; Chandra Gnanasambandam is a senior partner in the Silicon Valley office, where Bhargs Srivathsan is an associate partner; and Leandro Santos is a senior partner in the Atlanta office.

The authors wish to thank Chhavi Arora, Jerome Bouaziz, Raghuvar Choppakatla, Adrian Chu, Tarek Elmasry, William Forrest, Neha Jindal, James Kaplan, Roger Roberts, Divya Sachdev, and Kaavini Takkar for their contributions to this article.

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Cloud migration: Case study and lessons learned

By Nick Butler

Tags : Agile , Development

This cloud migration case study shows how DigitalNZ increased the flexibility, security, reliability and cost transparency of their web applications by moving them to the cloud. By cutting the time spent managing and maintaining their platform, they’ve freed up time to work on improvements and extensions.

The move has boosted their ability to achieve their mission: making it easy to find, share and use New Zealand’s digital content. By opening up our digital treasure trove, they’re helping bring Kiwi culture to life, now and for years to come.

In the case study, DigitalNZ Systems Manager James Robertson looks at:

• why they kicked off their cloud migration
• which cloud they went for, and why
• how they went about moving to the cloud
• the benefits they’ve gained, and how they got them
• organisational concerns they addressed
• the lessons learned along the way.

These lessons include:

• An Agile approach makes moving to the cloud more manageable. This was key to the success of the DigitalNZ migration.
• Avoid overinvesting in upfront cost estimation.
• The range of cloud offerings is large and evolving. Start simple and adapt to change.
• Take advantage of native tools for managing cost and security.
• Getting organisational sign-off can take time.

DigitalNZ is a one-stop search site for New Zealand digital content. Run by the National Library of New Zealand, the site gives easy access to over 30 million items — photos, videos, news stories and more — from over 200 content partners. Enabling this digital collection aggregation is a complex set of applications, databases and supporting infrastructure.

Learn more about the development of the DigitalNZ web applications .

Why move to the cloud

James Robertson says there were two main drivers for DigitalNZ’s cloud migration.

“Our physical servers were aging beyond their economic lifespan and even starting to fail. We knew we had to make a change. At the same time, the government introduced a cloud-first direction , so all agencies were required to at least investigate cloud as an option,” he says.

Which cloud DigitalNZ went for

DigitalNZ chose Amazon Web Services as their cloud provider.

“AWS had the widest range of offerings, and the offerings that were aligned with our existing architecture,” says James.

“It’s also quite well-supported in New Zealand. We have direct access to AWS solution architects. They’ve been very helpful, both with helping to resolve specific problems or questions, and also for general training to the devs and the wider audience who need to understand the cloud.”

Boost’s developers have certainly found the support invaluable. And the feedback from the AWS support team has been heartening, with the consultants noting that the team’s level of expertise allows for in-depth technical discussions and innovative approaches.

How DigitalNZ moved to the cloud: Agile cloud migration

“We were able to take an Agile approach, which meant starting with things that were easy, so that people got their feet under the table, learned the basics. Then we moved onto things with higher uncertainty.

“That meant not appearing to deliver so much in the early phases, but it makes sure that when we do come to deliver, everything falls into place a lot more smoothly.”

Not having a project with set milestones helped.

“We’ve been able to migrate at the pace that we were comfortable with, learn our lessons as we go.

“That does mean that we’ve had a bit of a split focus. We’ve had to maintain our existing systems at the same time as migrating them to the cloud.

“We’ve had to do a bit of patching on the old servers and that sort of thing, but apart from that, we haven’t had to invest a lot in the existing infrastructure,” he says. “Once we’re actually moving an application, we try and get it in production in the cloud in a fairly short timeframe.”

Four stage cloud migration

James sees their cloud migration falling into four stages.

“These stages won’t be relevant for everyone. They work for us because of the Agile nature of our work.”

“For us, stage one is more of an exploration — learning about the cloud, trying the obvious stuff, getting comfortable with the different offerings and different solutions.”

“The second stage is focusing on the bigger unknowns and building out some infrastructure. You’re making sure that you’ve got good security in place, your network’s set up right, your VPC’s [Virtual Private Cloud] right. You’ve got all the major components that you need and you’re confident that they can communicate with one another and with the outside world, or external networks.

“During both of those phases, you’re probably also migrating some simple workloads, some simple web applications, for example, or database content. That way you’ve got some wins under your belt too. You can say, ‘Hey, look, we cloudified this thing, and it hasn’t fallen over.’”

“We’re probably in the third phase now, which is just working through cloudifying each of our individual applications and sets of data.”

“The fourth stage will be decommissioning our old hardware and making sure we’ve got archives of things we need archives of.

“It will also involve re-architecting some things. As we’ve gone, we’ve changed the way we do some things to better fit the cloud, but we haven’t done a lot of in-depth re-architecting. We’re not making the most of cloud-native services for example. The next thing to do will be to look more closely at some of our big pieces of software infrastructure and how they could be more effective and more efficient in the cloud.”

Range and rate of change of cloud offerings

An Agile approach also helps you deal with the range and rate of change of cloud offerings.

“It’s quite overwhelming to start with, particularly from a provider like AWS. They have hundreds of different service offerings. Working out which are relevant for you is a bit of a challenge, but there’s usually a core of services that you can make a start with.”

On top of that, the cloud is always evolving.

“The rate of change — that’s definitely something you need to accept.”

It can be frustrating when a new feature arrives just after you decide to go down a different route. But it’s also a good thing, because it means there are always going to be new opportunities.

The benefits of cloud migration

Reliability.

Reducing dependence on aging servers has increased reliability.

“We have fewer outages. That’s also partly because, now that we’re with one (cloud) vendor, we’re not reliant on so many other moving parts between our servers and serving the public.

“And if a part of our infrastructure were to die, for whatever reason, or we needed to recreate it somewhere else, it’d be way simpler than if some physical server was dying somewhere.”

Flexibility

The cloud migration has made the DigitalNZ infrastructure more flexible. It’s both more adaptable and more resilient. It can easily be scaled up or down as demand or new services require.

“It makes it much easier for us to experiment with new ways of providing services or managing our existing infrastructure, so we can be more adaptable,” says James.

There was some initial concern that additional security measures would be needed for the move to the cloud.

“We learned that the security options that are available to you out of the box, cheaply or easily, are pretty comprehensive. You should be able to satisfy any set of security policies that your organisation may need.

“AWS provides some great tools. Trusted Advisor basically scans, if you like, your infrastructure and identifies potential weaknesses,” he says. “ Guard Duty is another tool, an active threat identification service from AWS.”

“The other side of security, I guess, is logging and deleting. Again, AWS has lots of tools for that, for making sure that you can audit. If an incident does occur, you can find where and when that happened and who the likely actors were.”

Cost management

As a result of the cloud migration, the cost of the DigitalNZ infrastructure is more transparent.

“Cost is much more at the front of my mind than it used to be, when we had our physical servers that we’d already paid for upfront,” says James.

“I’ve done a bit of research and it pays not to over-invest in trying to estimate what your costs are going to be ahead of time. Because it’s pretty hard to predict, unless you’ve had some solid cloud experience.

“We did a rough estimate for cost, based on a like-for-like comparison between the server setup and management, maintenance costs that we had, versus something similar in the cloud. There’s plenty of calculators and big lists of pricing for each region,” James says. “We’ve reacted as we’ve gone. We needed to get some production workloads into the cloud before we focused on cost reduction.”

Other cost management lessons:

• Optimise between On-Demand versus Reserved (a.k.a. Savings Plans) versus Spot instances. Here, for example, are the relative prices for AWS instances .
• Use tools such as AWS’s Trusted Advisor and Cost Explorer to identify inefficient usage and potential cost savings.
• Because it’s so easy to spin up new resources, it’s easy to forget what you’re running. Regular checks for underused resources help here.

“Quite a lot of the stories that we do, the development team do, are investigations or implementations of cost-reduction measures,” says James.

Freeing up maintenance time for improvements

“One of the biggest benefits of the cloud is the number of managed services that they offer. Managed services take away all of the maintenance burden, security patching, upgrades all of that sort of stuff.

“We’re able to spend less money on managing and maintaining our service and more on new developments,” says James.

Organisational concerns to consider

James found it took a while to get the required security and risk assessments and architectural sign-offs.

“I was fortunate in being supported by my manager to go ahead and start getting some work done, albeit prototype, non-production-mode-type work, prior to those sign-offs happening.”

Sign-offs may also include data sovereignty. Some New Zealand organisations, for example, will need to consider Māori data sovereignty.

And, as more organisations track their carbon footprint, it can pay to be clear up front on the impact your cloud migration will have. AWS, for example, has quite a high carbon footprint, especially in the Sydney centre that serves New Zealand.

The cloud is a land of opportunity

Exciting and challenging, taking on a cloud migration is also a great opportunity.

For DigitalNZ, it has increased reliability, security and transparency of costs. The new set up is also much more flexible. It can easily be scaled up or down as demand or new services require. And, importantly, it’s freed up time to focus on improving services.

“As Systems Manager, I’m better able to support the rest of DigitalNZ team in developing new features and serving new audiences in new ways,” says James.

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Completing the netflix cloud migration.

Yury Izrailevsky

Vice President, Cloud Computing and Platform Engineering

Stevan Vlaovic

Vice President, Membership Engineering

Ruslan Meshenberg

Vice President, Productivity Engineering

Our journey to the cloud at Netflix began in August of 2008, when we experienced a major database corruption and for three days could not ship DVDs to our members. That is when we realized that we had to move away from vertically scaled single points of failure, like relational databases in our datacenter, towards highly reliable, horizontally scalable, distributed systems in the cloud. We chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as our cloud provider because it provided us with the greatest scale and the broadest set of services and features. The majority of our systems, including all customer-facing services, had been migrated to the cloud prior to 2015. Since then, we've been taking the time necessary to figure out a secure and durable cloud path for our billing infrastructure as well as all aspects of our customer and employee data management. We are happy to report that in early January, 2016, after seven years of diligent effort, we have finally completed our cloud migration and shut down the last remaining data center bits used by our streaming service!

Moving to the cloud has brought Netflix a number of benefits. We have eight times as many streaming members than we did in 2008, and they are much more engaged, with overall viewing growing by three orders of magnitude in eight years:

The Netflix product itself has continued to evolve rapidly, incorporating many new resource-hungry features and relying on ever-growing volumes of data. Supporting such rapid growth would have been extremely difficult out of our own data centers; we simply could not have racked the servers fast enough. Elasticity of the cloud allows us to add thousands of virtual servers and petabytes of storage within minutes, making such an expansion possible. On January 6, 2016, Netflix expanded its service to over 130 new countries, becoming a truly global Internet TV network. Leveraging multiple AWS cloud regions, spread all over the world, enables us to dynamically shift around and expand our global infrastructure capacity, creating a better and more enjoyable streaming experience for Netflix members wherever they are.

We rely on the cloud for all of our scalable computing and storage needs — our business logic, distributed databases and big data processing/analytics, recommendations, transcoding, and hundreds of other functions that make up the Netflix application. Video is delivered through Netflix Open Connect, our content delivery network that is distributed globally to efficiently deliver our bits to members’ devices.

The cloud also allowed us to significantly increase our service availability. There were a number of outages in our data centers, and while we have hit some inevitable rough patches in the cloud, especially in the earlier days of cloud migration, we saw a steady increase in our overall availability, nearing our desired goal of four nines of service uptime. Failures are unavoidable in any large scale distributed system, including a cloud-based one. However, the cloud allows one to build highly reliable services out of fundamentally unreliable but redundant components. By incorporating the principles of redundancy and graceful degradation in our architecture, and being disciplined about regular production drills using Simian Army , it is possible to survive failures in the cloud infrastructure and within our own systems without impacting the member experience.

Cost reduction was not the main reason we decided to move to the cloud. However, our cloud costs per streaming start ended up being a fraction of those in the data center -- a welcome side benefit. This is possible due to the elasticity of the cloud, enabling us to continuously optimize instance type mix and to grow and shrink our footprint near-instantaneously without the need to maintain large capacity buffers. We can also benefit from the economies of scale that are only possible in a large cloud ecosystem.

Given the obvious benefits of the cloud, why did it take us a full seven years to complete the migration? The truth is, moving to the cloud was a lot of hard work, and we had to make a number of difficult choices along the way. Arguably, the easiest way to move to the cloud is to forklift all of the systems, unchanged, out of the data center and drop them in AWS. But in doing so, you end up moving all the problems and limitations of the data center along with it. Instead, we chose the cloud-native approach, rebuilding virtually all of our technology and fundamentally changing the way we operate the company. Architecturally, we migrated from a monolithic app to hundreds of micro-services, and denormalized and our data model, using NoSQL databases. Budget approvals, centralized release coordination and multi-week hardware provisioning cycles made way to continuous delivery, engineering teams making independent decisions using self service tools in a loosely coupled DevOps environment, helping accelerate innovation. Many new systems had to be built, and new skills learned. It took time and effort to transform Netflix into a cloud-native company, but it put us in a much better position to continue to grow and become a global TV network.

Netflix streaming technology has come a long way over the past few years, and it feels great to finally not be constrained by the limitations we've previously faced. As the cloud is still quite new to many of us in the industry, there are many questions to answer and problems to solve. Through initiatives such as Netflix Open Source , we hope to continue collaborating with great technology minds out there and together address all of these challenges.

-Yury Izrailevsky, Stevan Vlaovic and Ruslan Meshenberg

• Cloud Computing

AWS Case Studies: Services and Benefits in 2024

Home Blog Cloud Computing AWS Case Studies: Services and Benefits in 2024

With its extensive range of cloud services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has completely changed the way businesses run. Organisations demonstrate how AWS has revolutionized their operations by enabling scalability, cost-efficiency, and innovation through many case studies. AWS's computing power, storage, database management, and artificial intelligence technologies have benefited businesses of all sizes, from startups to multinational corporations. These include improved security, agility, worldwide reach, and lower infrastructure costs. With Amazon AWS educate program it helps businesses in various industries to increase growth, enhance workflow, and maintain their competitiveness in today's ever-changing digital landscape. So, let's discuss the AWS cloud migration case study   and its importance in getting a better understanding of the topic in detail.

What are AWS Case Studies, and Why are They Important?

The   AWS case   studies comprehensively explain how companies or organizations have used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to solve problems, boost productivity, and accomplish objectives. These studies provide real-life scenarios of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in operation, showcasing the wide range of sectors and use cases in which AWS can be successfully implemented. They offer vital lessons and inspiration for anyone considering or already using AWS by providing insights into the tactics, solutions, and best practices businesses use the AWS Cloud Engineer program . The Amazon ec2 case study   is crucial since it provides S's capabilities, assisting prospective clients in comprehending the valuable advantages and showcasing AWS's dependability, scalability, and affordability in fostering corporate innovation and expansion.

What are the Services Provided by AWS, and What are its Use Cases?

The   case study on AWS in Cloud Computing provided and its use cases mentioned:

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Use Cases

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) enables you to quickly spin up virtual computers with no initial expenditure and no need for a significant hardware investment. Use the AWS admin console or automation scripts to provision new servers for testing and production environments promptly and shut them down when not in use.

AWS EC2 use cases consist of:

• With options for load balancing and auto-scaling, create a fault-tolerant architecture.
• Select EC2 accelerated computing instances if you require a lot of processing power and GPU capability for deep learning and machine learning.

Relational Database Service (RDS) Use Cases

Since Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a managed database service, it alleviates the stress associated with maintaining, administering, and other database-related responsibilities.

AWS RDS uses common cases, including:

• Without additional overhead or staff expenditures, a new database server can be deployed in minutes and significantly elevate dependability and uptime. It is the perfect fit for complex daily database requirements that are OLTP/transactional.
• RDS should be utilized with NoSQL databases like Amazon OpenSearch Service (for text and unstructured data) and DynamoDB (for low-latency/high-traffic use cases).

AWS Workspaces

AWS offers Amazon Workspaces, a fully managed, persistent desktop virtualization service, to help remote workers and give businesses access to virtual desktops within the cloud. With it, users can access the data, apps, and resources they require from any supported device, anywhere, at any time.

AWS workspaces use cases

• IT can set up and manage access fast. With the web filter, you can allow outgoing traffic from a Workspace to reach your chosen internal sites.
• Some companies can work without physical offices and rely solely on SaaS apps. Thus, there is no on-premises infrastructure. They use cloud-based desktops via AWS Workspaces and other services in these situations.

AWS Case Studies

Now, we'll be discussing different case studies of AWS, which are mentioned below: -

Case Study - 1: Modern Web Application Platform with AWS

American Public Media, the programming section of Minnesota Public Radio, is one of the world's biggest producers and distributors of public television. To host their podcast, streaming music, and news websites on AWS, they worked to develop a proof of concept.

After reviewing an outdated active-passive disaster recovery plan, MPR decided to upgrade to a cloud infrastructure to modernize its apps and methodology. This infrastructure would need to be adaptable to changes within the technology powering their apps, scalable to accommodate their audience growth, and resilient to support their disaster recovery strategy.

MPR and AWS determined that MPR News and the public podcast websites should be hosted on the new infrastructure to show off AWS as a feasible choice. Furthermore, AWS must host multiple administrative apps to demonstrate its private cloud capabilities. These applications would be an image manager, a schedule editor, and a configuration manager.

To do this, AWS helped MPR set up an EKS Kubernetes cluster . The apps would be able to grow automatically according to workload and traffic due to the cluster. AWS and MPR developed Elasticsearch at Elastic.co and a MySQL instance in RDS to hold application data.

Business Benefits

Considerable cost savings were made possible by the upgraded infrastructure. Fewer servers would need to be acquired for these vital applications due to the decrease in hardware requirements. Additionally, switching to AWS made switching from Akamai CDN to CloudFront simple. This action reduced MPR's yearly expenses by thousands.

Case Study - 2: Platform Modernisation to Deploy to AWS

Foodsby was able to proceed with its expansion goals after receiving a $6 million investment in 2017, but it still needed to modernize its mobile and web applications. For a faster time to launch to AWS, they improved and enhanced their web, iOS, and Android applications.

Sunsetting technology put this project on a surged timeline. Selecting the mobile application platform required serious analysis and expert advice to establish consensus across internal stakeholders.

Improving the creation of front-end and back-end web apps that separated them into microservices to enable AWS hosting, maximizing scalability. Strengthening recommended full Native for iOS and Android and quickly creating and implementing that solution.

Case Study - 3: Cloud Platform with Kubernetes

SPS Commerce hired AWS to assist them with developing a more secure cloud platform, expanding their cloud deployment choices through Kubernetes, and educating their engineers on these advanced technologies.

SPS serves over 90,000 retail, distribution, grocery, and e-commerce businesses. However, to maintain its growth, SPS needs to remove obstacles to deploying new applications on AWS and other cloud providers in the future. They wanted a partner to teach their internal development team DevOps principles and reveal them to Kubernetes best practices, even though they knew Kubernetes would help them achieve this.

To speed up new project cycle times, decrease ramp-up times, and improve the team's Kubernetes proficiency, it assisted with developing a multi-team, Kubernetes-based platform with a uniform development method. The standards for development and deployment and assisted them in establishing the deployment pipeline.

Most teams can plug, play, and get code up and running quickly due to the streamlined deployment interface. SPS Commerce benefits from Kubernetes' flexibility and can avoid vendor lock-in, which they require to switch cloud providers.

Case Study - 4: Using Unified Payment Solutions to Simplify Government Services

The customer, who had a portfolio of firms within its authority, needed to improve experience to overcome the difficulty of combining many payment methods into a single, unified solution.

Due to the customers' varied acquisitions, the payment system landscape became fragmented, making it more difficult for clients to make payments throughout a range of platforms as well as technologies. Providing a streamlined payment experience could have been improved by this lack of coherence and standardization.

It started developing a single, cloud-based payment system that complies with the customers' microservices-based reference design. CRUD services were created after the user interface for client administration was set at the beginning of the project.

With this, the customer can streamline operations and increase efficiency by providing a smooth payment experience.

The new system demonstrated a tremendous improvement over the old capability, demonstrating the ability to handle thousands of transactions per second.

Maintaining system consistency and facilitating scalability and maintenance were made more accessible by aligning with the reference architecture.

Case Study - 5: Accelerated Data Migration to AWS

They selected improvements to create   an   AWS cloud migration case study cloud platform to safely transfer their data from a managed service provider to AWS during the early phases of a worldwide pandemic.

Early in 2020, COVID-19 was discovered, and telemedicine services were used to lessen the strain on hospital infrastructure. The number of telehealth web queries increased dramatically overnight, from 5,000 to 40,000 per minute. Through improvement, Zipnosis was able to change direction and reduce the duration of its AWS migration plan from six to three months. The AWS architecture case study includes HIPAA, SOC2, and HITRUST certification requirements. They also wanted to move their historic database smoothly across several web-facing applications while adhering to service level agreements (SLAs), which limited downtime.

Using Terraform and Elastic Kubernetes Service, the AWS platform creates a modern, infrastructure-as-code, HIPAA-compliant, and HITRUST-certified environment. With the help of serverless components, tools were developed to roll out an Application Envelope, enabling the creation of a HIPAA-compliant environment that could be activated quickly.

Currently, Zipnosis has internal platform management. Now that there is more flexibility, scaling up and down is more affordable and accessible. Their services are more marketable to potential clients because of their scalable, secure, and efficient infrastructure. Their use of modern technologies, such as Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, simplifies hiring top people. Zipnosis is in an excellent position to move forward.

Case Study - 6: Transforming Healthcare Staffing

The customer's outdated application presented difficulties. It was based on the outdated DBROCKET platform and needed an intuitive user interface, testing tools, and extensibility. Modernizing the application was improving the job and giving the customer an improved, scalable, and maintainable solution.

Although the customer's old application was crucial for predicting hospital staffing needs, maintenance, and improvements were challenging due to its reliance on the obscure DBROCKET platform. Hospitals lost money on inefficient staff scheduling due to the application's lack of responsiveness and a mobile-friendly interface.

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• Customer References

Impulse Logic helps customers reduce labor costs by 40% with OCI

June 26, 2024 | 11 minute read

Authored by Kellsey Ruppel, principal product marketing director at Oracle.

The gap between demand and supply in the retail industry contributes to hundreds of millions of dollars in lost sales annually. To address this problem, Impulse Logic’s store optimization software, SLiQ, provides a predictive analytics engine that detects and exposes inventory risk. The company originally deployed SLiQ at customers’ sites in an on-premises model. Implementations could take as long as six months to complete. Because of the radical peaks and valleys in sales within retail, the firm maintained data center capacity to serve customers during the highest periods of demand, which threatened its pricing model.

Consequently, Impulse Logic migrated development to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and began to offer the precursor to what is now its SLiQ as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. However, as the global pandemic exacerbated retailers’ inventory distortion problems, company leaders recognized opportunities to expand the business beyond its primary market in the UK to other markets, especially the US and Middle East. New clients wanted to go live more rapidly, often in hundreds of locations simultaneously, so the SaaS model was ideal.

However, when Amazon became a direct competitor in the food and grocery sectors, Impulse Logic decided to evaluate other cloud platform providers that would help it not only deploy SLiQ more rapidly across global regions, but also maintain an optimal pricing structure for its clients.

Goals for cloud migration

Impulse Logic was looking to modernize its SLiQ application from a monolithic application to a cloud native application to make the application more scalable and more resilient to large spikes in demand, which would accommodate Impulse Logic's expanding customer base. Each new onboarded customer typically has many retail stores, and the product must be ready to go live at all locations in a short amount of time. Impulse Logic needed to simplify and offload much of its infrastructure and database management by leveraging managed services. Overall, Impulse Logic wanted to help its customers with the following processes:

• Predict inventory targets with greater accuracy
• Reduce labor costs
• Lift projected profits

Why Impulse Logic chose Oracle

Impulse Logic’s leadership evaluated IBM, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and the option to remain on AWS. The assessment of IBM determined that DB2 and related security capabilities were not ideal for Impulse Logic’s solutions. Microsoft Azure was also subsequently eliminated from consideration for scalability concerns of the SQL database at that time. Ultimately, the company’s leadership selected OCI based on multiple factors. Impulse Logic’s staff had a continuous history of using Oracle databases for both on-premises and AWS SaaS workloads. These experiences and the emerging availability of automated database maintenance capabilities in Oracle Autonomous Database were a big benefit. In addition, Oracle was willing to invest resources into the migration effort to support the successful migration of 3.5M lines of code from AWS to OCI in just over 30 days.

The final two key factors that determined the selection of OCI were the technical capabilities of Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) clusters and the superior performance and security capabilities associated with Oracle Autonomous Database for transaction processing and mixed workloads as a managed service. The near real-time transaction processing, when applied across hundreds of stores with multiple checkout lanes and digital purchase fulfilments, saw processing loads not dissimilar to online transaction processing, and it was here that OCI excelled.

“The capabilities of Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes and Oracle Autonomous Database on OCI have enabled us to transform our SLiQ solution into a truly cloud native application,” says Les McNeill, founder of Impulse Logic. “This has streamlined development and customer deployments while also providing scalability and elasticity to support the highly fluctuating workloads of our clients.”

Suite of Oracle products used

OCI includes all the services needed to migrate, build, and run IT in the cloud, from existing enterprise workloads to new cloud native applications and data platforms. Impulse Logic used the following OCI services and technologies:

• Autonomous Database : OCI Autonomous Database is a fully managed, preconfigured database environments that you can use for transaction processing and data warehousing workloads. You don’t need to configure or manage any hardware or install any software. OCI handles creating, backing up, patching, upgrading, and tuning the database.
• Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) : Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) is a managed Kubernetes service that simplifies the operations of enterprise-grade Kubernetes at scale. It reduces the time, cost, and effort needed to manage the complexities of the Kubernetes infrastructure. Container Engine for Kubernetes lets you deploy Kubernetes clusters and ensure reliable operations for both the control plane and the worker nodes with automatic scaling, upgrades, and security patching. Additionally, OKE provides a fully serverless Kubernetes experience with virtual nodes.
• Autonomous Transaction Processing : Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing is a self-driving, self-securing, self-repairing database service that is optimized for transaction processing workloads. You don’t need to configure or manage any hardware or install any software. OCI handles creating the database, as well as backing up, patching, upgrading, and tuning the database.
• Tenancy : A tenancy is a secure and isolated partition that Oracle sets up within Oracle Cloud when you sign up for OCI. You can create, organize, and administer your resources in OCI within your tenancy. A tenancy is synonymous with a company or organization. Usually, a company will have a single tenancy and reflect its organizational structure within that tenancy. A single tenancy is usually associated with a single subscription, and a single subscription usually only has one tenancy.
• Region : An OCI region is a localized geographic area that contains one or more data centers, called availability domains. Regions are independent of other regions, and vast distances can separate them across countries or even continents.
• Compartment : Compartments are crossregion logical partitions within an OCI tenancy. Use compartments to organize your resources in OCI, control access to the resources, and set usage quotas. To control access to the resources in a compartment, you define policies that specify who can access the resources and what actions they can perform.
• Availability domain : Availability domains are standalone, independent data centers within a region. The physical resources in each availability domain are isolated from the resources in the other availability domains, which provides fault tolerance. Availability domains don’t share infrastructure, such as power or cooling, or the internal availability domain network. So, a failure at one availability domain is unlikely to affect the other availability domains in the region.
• Virtual cloud network (VCN) and subnets : A VCN is a customizable, software-defined network that you set up in an OCI region. Like traditional data center networks, VCNs give you complete control over your network environment. A VCN can have multiple nonoverlapping CIDR blocks that you can change after you create the VCN. You can segment a VCN into subnets, which you can scope to a region or an availability domain. Each subnet consists of a contiguous range of addresses that don’t overlap with the other subnets in the VCN. You can change the size of a subnet after creation. A subnet can be public or private.
• Security list : For each subnet, you can create security rules that specify the source, destination, and type of traffic that must be allowed in and out of the subnet.
• Route table : Virtual route tables contain rules to route traffic from subnets to destinations outside a VCN, typically through gateways.
• Internet gateway : The internet gateway allows traffic between the public subnets in a VCN and the public internet.
• Dynamic routing gateway (DRG) : The DRG is a virtual router that provides a path for private network traffic between VCNs in the same region, between a VCN and a network outside the region, such as a VCN in another OCI region, an on-premises network, or a network in another cloud provider.
• Service gateway : The service gateway provides access from a VCN to other services, such as OCI Object Storage. The traffic from the VCN to the Oracle service travels over the Oracle network fabric and never traverses the internet.
• Site-to-Site VPN : Site-to-Site VPN provides IPSec VPN connectivity between your on-premises network and VCNs in OCI. The IPSec protocol suite encrypts IP traffic before the packets are transferred from the source to the destination and decrypts the traffic when it arrives.
• Load balancer : The OCI Load Balancing service provides automated traffic distribution from a single entry point to multiple servers in the back end.
• Bastion service : OCI Bastion provides restricted and time-limited secure access to resources that don't have public endpoints and that require strict resource access controls, such as bare metal and virtual machines (VMs), the Oracle MySQL Database service, Autonomous Transaction Processing, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE), and any other resource that allows Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) access. With OCI Bastion, you can enable access to private hosts without deploying and maintaining a jump host. You also gain improved security posture with identity-based permissions and a centralized, audited, and time-bound SSH session. OCI Bastion removes the need for a public IP for bastion access, eliminating the hassle and potential attack surface when providing remote access.
• Object Storage : OCI Object Storage provides quick access to large amounts of structured and unstructured data of any content type, including database backups, analytic data, and rich content, such as images and videos. You can safely and securely store and then retrieve data directly from the internet or from within the cloud platform. You can seamlessly scale storage without experiencing any degradation in performance or service reliability. Use standard storage for hot storage that you need to access quickly, immediately, and frequently. Use archive storage for cold storage that you retain for long periods of time and seldom or rarely access.
• Registry : OCI Registry is an Oracle-managed registry that enables you to simplify your development-to-production workflow. Registry makes it easy for you to store, share, and manage development artifacts, like Docker images. The highly available and scalable architecture of OCI ensures that you can deploy and manage your applications reliably.
• Identity and Access Management (IAM) : OCI IAM is the access control plane for OCI and Oracle Cloud Applications. The IAM API and the user interface enable you to manage identity domains and the resources within the identity domain. Each OCI IAM identity domain represents a standalone identity and access management solution or a different user population.

Migration path

Impulse Logic's architecture begins with the Merchandise IQ service (MiQ), which is typically deployed as an appliance within a retailer's firewall, enabling it to extract real-time data from multiple sources.

When deployed on-premises at the retailer, MiQ collects inventory data at certain intervals. As inventory at the retail store is being updated, MiQ extracts shopper demand data but doesn’t include personal identity information, credit card information, or retailer personnel data. MiQ integrates the federation of disparate data feeds from multiple application silos with 10–13 separate data sources, read in their native format and normalized for SLiQ processing. MiQ functions without changing the existing legacy systems or requiring any preprocessing of data.

When MiQ is deployed in OCI, the customer first sends the data set to OCI Object Storage. The MiQ instance in OCI then extracts the data and sends it to SLiQ for processing. Whether deployed on-premises or in OCI, MiQ uses REST APIs to send data to SLiQ. The upload to Object Storage is HTTPS encrypted.

SLiQ's microservices are used for data transformation, web and mobile applications, user services, store services, product services, and more. The machine learning (ML) capabilities for training and prediction are developed in Python. After receiving the data sets that are extracted by MiQ, SLiQ loads this data into Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing for ML analysis. The ML capability trains the model, predicts inventory events, and then sends recommendations back to the retail employees to access the results through mobile devices. The retail employees are provided with actionable insights, such as which shelves to stock and when to restock them, minimizing the time products sit in the stockroom or warehouse.

During the implementation period, Impulse Logic works with retailers to apply parameters and define retailer-specific functionality. SLiQ uses these parameters and functions to train and predict SLiQ’s ML capabilities, providing retailers with recommendations to optimize their inventory.

The following diagram illustrates the data flow through this reference architecture:

Using Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing, Impulse Logic has simplified its operations and maintenance because of the Autonomous Database's self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing capabilities. With OKE, Impulse Logic has transformed SLiQ into a cloud native application, allowing them to add more capabilities without affecting existing components of the application. They can continue to improve the ML capabilities, introduce new training models, and reduce testing and implementation times with a cloud native application developed through OKE.

The following diagram illustrates this reference architecture:

Impulse Logic migrated all its SLiQ workloads to OCI. Oracle Autonomous Database for transaction processing and mixed workloads on OCI provided fully managed, preconfigured database environments that eliminated the need for the firm’s IT staff to configure hardware, manage hardware, or install software. OCI automatically creates databases, while also handling backup, upgrade, patching, and tuning activities.

With OKE, the company transformed SLiQ into a cloud native application. They can add more capabilities without affecting existing components of the application. New customers typically go live within 75 days and have reduced labor cosys by 40%. OCI’s elasticity and scalability automatically and transparently provisions resources in response to the large fluctuations in demand experienced by Impulse Logic’s customers. OCI’s Flexible Load Balancing distributes web requests across a fleet of servers or automatically routes traffic across fault domains, availability domains, or regions. This yields high availability and fault tolerance for SLiQ transactions.

Oracle’s extensive and expanding network of global cloud data center regions supports Impulse Logic’s business expansion plans. OCI offers uniform pricing across all global regions, enabling the firm to maintain a predictable, consistent, and optimal pricing structure for its clients worldwide.

The migration to OCI positively impacted Impulse Logic’s decision to move SLiQ from a monolithic application to a microservices architecture. Its stability on OCI facilitated a faster migration, which included all the automated intelligence and ML components moving into their own microservices.

In the future, Impulse Logic’s leadership expects rising interest in supporting customers’ multicloud strategies. For example, one the company’s key European customers is fully deployed on Azure. In this account, SLiQ is deployed on OCI, with a continuous data interchange between the SLiQ deployment on OCI, with outcomes exposed to legacy systems on Azure. While not an absolute multicloud deployment , it illustrates OCI’s ease of integration and provides more validation of the decision to move to OCI as Oracle expands its multicloud capabilities.

For more information on Impulse Logic and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, see the following resources:

• Video: Impulse Logic runs inventory analytics in K8 cluster on Oracle Cloud
• Explore other technical case studies from OCI
• Try Oracle Cloud for yourself