About Customer
A market leader in the mobile telecommunications sector, the customer is at the forefront of digitization and innovation in Srilanka’s mobile industry. They have a robust footprint in the digital pay television, fixed telecommunications, and financial services through 4 subsidiaries. The customer delivers high speed mobile broadband and advanced mobile telephony, having a subscriber pool of more than 17 million.
The Need to Modernize the Data Platform on Cloud
The big data system of the customer was deployed on premises, particularly on Cloudera and their ETL ran on Oracle Exadata and informatica. They wanted to remove their analytics practice’s dependency on on-premises hardware due to time inefficiencies and expiry of their data warehouse. Due to these, their business performance faced a great impact.
Key challenges faced by the customer were
- Outdated analytics platform
- Legacy BI tools closing in on expiry
- High Capex and Opex cost
- Locked infrastructure
- High management cost
The customer’s vision was to become a leading provider of uninterrupted multi-sensory connectivity, which led them embark on the digital transformation journey by modernizing their data platform on the cloud.
Migration and Modernization of the Customer’s Data Ecosystem
Blazeclan, in association with Altria Consulting and Snowflake, understood the requirements of the customer and proposed the ‘Snowflake on AWS’ solution. The solution not only helped meet the following functional and non-functional requirements of the customer but also enabled a scalable, cost-effective, and secure modernization of their data platform.
- Agility and faster time-to-market
- Technical debt reduction
- Operational resiliency
- Technology rationalization
- User experience improvement
A single source of truth was achieved for the customer’s big data and ETL systems using Snowflake on AWS. A unified data platform was established consisting of data lake (AWS S3) and Data Warehouse (Snowflake) Architecture. Key integrated components of the data platform include Snowflake-driven data lake, AWS Glue, AWS QuickSight, AWS SageMaker, and AWS cloud security services.
Snowflake is used to store structured data hosted as-is in Exadata to drive existing reports and requirements of ACID properties, which were previously implemented using various technologies in Hadoop, such as Apache Hive and Kudu.
Benefits Achieved by the Customer
- Snowflake capabilities facilitated the customer’s digital transformation and modernization programs, enabling data processing with performance, reliability, and scalability.
- Streamlining the data architecture with an integrated framework effectively supported the customer’s data transformation.
- Time-Travel feature helped reduce backup-related activities required on daily basis during re-executions.
- Auto Start and Auto-Suspend features helped reduce cost significantly.
- Dynamic data masking facilitated PII data management and secure access.
- Support for semi-structure data enabled ingestion of file formats such as XML, Json, etc.
Tech Stack
| Amazon S3 | AWS Direct Connect | AWS Glue |
| AWS SageMaker | Amazon QuickSight | AWS CloudTrail |
| AWS CloudWatch | AWS IAM | AWS KMS |
| Amazon EMR | Amazon SNS | Amazon RDS |
| AWS Lake Formation | Snowflake | Tableau |
