Executive Summary

This company wanted to migrate a core business-critical application to the cloud. This involved a system review and assessment, various quick-fixes, and a lift and shift migration to the AWS cloud. Additionally, the company required a cloud native modernization journey to showcase the opportunity for further improvements in subsequent phases. QloudX, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, was approached to provide this springboard for digital transformation and further feature enhancements to the application.

The Challenge

For this project, the customer wanted to migrate a mission-critical application to the AWS cloud. The application faced several issues, as it was based on legacy .NET technology and suffered from latency and performance issues. Additionally, database and physical infrastructure was getting old and leading to performance issues, especially across continents (e.g., USA to India). Maintenance of the application was also becoming more and more difficult and nobody could add new features, with only limited features added in the last three years. In sum, this impacted the productivity of both teams working with the application and users using the application.

The customer thus requested a cloud native journey to first setup the application on AWS to improve performance due to its overall importance to business, alongside modernization of the application with a host of features to be added to enhance the application, which had been pending for a long time.

Opportunity

A traditional on-premise hosting model is these days not sufficient, due to modern day demands related to being able to deliver global applications. As such a cloud solution was deemed necessary to leverage cloud features like scalability, reliability, availability, and security in a very cost-effective manner, which help to improve application performance and the end-user experience.

This also provides the opportunity to bring the application up to speed and allow for additional development in a future-proof and cost-effective manner. As part of the modernization journey we set up cloud native environments, adopted end-to-end DevOps best-practices across the software pipelines, and performed a tech stack upgrade to redesign the application with a API-first approach using .NET 6.0 and modern web frameworks like angular, which enables us to experiment with the latest tech like gRPC and HTTP/2.

Our Solution

QloudX suggested a modernization approach for the application, with the first step being a deeper understanding of the application and underlying infrastructure. This included an application architecture review, as well as assessments of network, infrastructure, terminal setup, database, and application. With a deep understanding in place, we worked towards executing the lift and shift into the AWS cloud and defining the target architecture.

Initial efforts consisted of setting up a new AWS Control Tower and developing a CloudFormation script to automate infrastructure and application deployments. Additionally, we set up Transit Gateway to connect all VPN tunnels with all AWS accounts, accelerated multi route site-to-site VPN setup between the AWS region and remote company branches, and ensured IAM policies according to best-practices.

For the lift and shift, AWS CloudEndure was setup for both on-premise application and database servers to the AWS account to migrate existing on-premise servers. New EC2 servers were setup from CloudEndure replications with a load balancer in front of the application and DNS for the application. Logging and monitoring was also setup to enable proactive monitoring, alongside multiple availability zones in select AWS regions to ensure high availability.

A Solution that creates Value & Benefits

A modernization blueprint was formulated by focusing short term on the AWS migration along with database and infrastructure tuning with a focus on end-user computing optimization and other quick-fixes. The initial assessment and migration was completed in just 2 months with a number of immediate benefits:

• The solution delivers scalability from day one, optimising both utilisation and cost.
• The solution affords the company increased opportunity for disaster recovery, unrestricted availability and most importantly, enhanced performance.
• QloudX will continue to monitor application performance to consistently guarantee an optimal end-user experience.
• Similarly, security issues and cyber-attacks, can now more readily be identified and tackled.
• The company was also given the opportunity to turn the application into a more valuable product with the development of various features, improved caching and application delivery, and a UI-UX upgrade.

The company has gained an application with fast, consistent and reliable response times for a better end-user experience, alongside the opportunity for additional modernization improvements in the medium/long term to move from a monolithic application to a modernized one based on microservices.