Customer Profile
The customer is the longest established travel company in the world. Its distinguished history began in 1758 when it was appointed as general agents to the regiment of Foot Guards in India under the command of Lord Ligonier.
Their worldwide offices are located in UK, USA, Japan, Russia, Singapore, and Dubai. It has associate offices in Germany, Italy, Spain, South Africa, Sweden and Australia.
The Challenge
When the business said “go”, the customer had to find a way to be nimble. They had launched a Travel ERP program, known as Travelogix across the globe in 13 countries. This first of its kind ERP system was implemented using the below tech stack:
- Frontend Platform: .NET (In-house Product)/Sitecore as WEM
- Database Server: MSSQL DB, Mongo DB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle
- CMS: Sitecore
- CRM: Microsoft Dynamics CRM Integration
- Booking: Booking Engine (In-house Product)/MEAN Stack, JAVA Stack, Booking Engine, Operations, BRE Module Supplier Integration Stack (SOA)
With the continuous growth of the business, the client’s IT setup gradually started facing capacity issues. They also had many legacy applications running on-premise which they wanted to move to AWS and further re-architect them and make them cloud ready. The main focus over here was to reduce the time to delivery and make all the processes faster and simple in the entire organization.
The Solution
- Partnering with BlazeClan and leapfrogging to the cloud helped our client to differentiate in their very competitive industry. BlazeClan team provided cloud consulting services to create a complete application assessment and cloud migration strategy along with a proposed implementation plan and timeline.
In the plan, BlazeClan’s team of certified SA’s created a business case analysis, security risk matrix, and total cost of ownership and ROI calculations to provide an in-depth look how to move successfully on the cloud and realize opportunities for significant costs savings. The team charted out a roadmap for migrating 10+ applications under travelogix program to cloud. The team of certified SAs defined a 3 step strategy phases that included:
- Phase 1 – Assessment of the existing architecture and existing network and security configuration. Assessing tools to be used for application migration (VM Import/Export, Server Migration, Migration Tools) and to migrate the database (Database Migration Service, Replication Tools, Migration Tools), devising migration strategy to move application servers and database servers, migrating data onto AWS. Defining move groups for migration and network & security strategy.
- Phase 2 – Migrating the production environment onto AWS leveraging DevOps tools. Setting up AWS infrastructure. This also included refinement of IAM user management and authorization authentication as per the underlying best practices.
- Phase 3 – Migration was followed by managed services that included 24/7 monitoring and support, Application Monitoring, Database Monitoring, Incident Management, Housekeeping Activities and cost optimization.
The Benefits
- High availability: Successful migration of applications from on-prem to AWS enabled the customer to take advantage of on-demand compute, scaling up and down as needed for the peak season without oversubscribed capital purchases.
- Improved Performance: The entire system was deployed in auto-scaling mode and hence the client was able to scale during peak time using the auto-scaling functionality of AWS.
- Cost Savings: This engagement brought about massive cost savings as payments needed to be made only for actual usage.
- Lower financial risk: BlazeClan team helped in reducing the company’s financial risk by moving from a CAPEX based to OPEX based. The customer is now utilizing the agility of the system by running dev. systems only for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.
Tech Stack
BlazeClan availed a number of AWS services to execute this project successfully.
- Amazon EC2 was used for computing capacity management for their application deployment. It helped in reducing the time required to spin up new server instances to minutes, allowing them to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as per their requirement.
- Amazon S3 was used to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere and everywhere.
- AWS NAT Gateway was used to allow instances on a private subnet to connect to the Internet or to other AWS services.
- AWS CloudWatch was used to monitor the performance of the system
- AWS Guard Duty was used for continuous monitoring purposes, to identify any malicious or unauthorized behaviour in order to protect their AWS accounts and workloads
- AWS Lambda helped in running the code without provisioning or managing servers.
- AWS Import/Export was used to address the challenges with large data transfers that result in high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns.
