Cloud-to-Cloud Webshop Migration with Cloud Native Redesign

Products used

AWS, including Route53, CloudFormation, NLB (Network Log Balancer), Puppet, Ansible, Gitlab, Graphana / Prometheus

Solution and methodology

Agile sprint planning, GitFlow, infrastructure as code and configuration as code, containerization, introduction and workshops on DevSecOps

Weltbild is a German publishing and book retail company headquartered in Augsburg, and a major multi-channel bookseller. Weltbild serves customers through online shops, direct marketing and its own stores. To reduce costs and increase flexibility, Weltbild migrated its webshop to AWS.

Most companies take their first steps toward the cloud for several reasons: to save costs on running their own IT infrastructure department, to react faster and more flexibly to future changes, and to make hardware generation upgrades easier. In addition, the cloud removes the need for long-term infrastructure capacity planning. For these reasons, Weltbild decided to move to the AWS cloud.

The first implementation took place with the Weltbild.de webshop. Moving to the cloud generally offers lower maintenance costs and higher flexibility. However, it must be considered that the hoped-for changes are not automatically achieved by an infrastructure move with a "lift and shift" mindset. Quite the opposite is often true: achieving these desired results requires effort and expertise in infrastructure redesign and the available cloud services.

Based on these findings, Weltbild launched a new project. Its main tasks consisted of (1) a renewed infrastructure migration, this time in (2) combination with a cloud redesign and (3) a more flexible workflow. The biggest challenge was a very strict deadline. Missing it would have meant Weltbild being tied to the legacy cloud for two more years, ultimately paying for infrastructure it no longer needed.

This is exactly where our XALT DevOps team was brought in. The goal was to accelerate the planned project and contribute additional know-how in AWS-specific technologies as well as infrastructure and configuration as code. This allowed us to ensure the complete infrastructure migration was finished on time, in line with the new project goals.

The first challenge was defining all necessary migration steps and turning them into a roadmap. Within the project, this served two purposes: it gave project management an overview and a visualization of identified risks that could affect the deadline, and it gave the project team defined goals that made completing the project within the given timeframe possible. This foundation let us give the Weltbild team the support needed to carry out the cloud migration using agile methods. Our DevOps team advised Weltbild along the way and introduced new methods and ways of working based on a DevSecOps mindset. These included, among others:

• Planning all required epics and tools
• Scrum Master / Product Owner support on technical cloud topics
• Running team workshops on the new tools and methods
• Improving collaboration and communication within the team
• Implementing a live project status for management
• Automating deployment
• Building a multi-account cloud environment

In the next step, the cloud-to-cloud migration of the webshop was carried out. The services were split into individual microservices, described as infrastructure as code, and then migrated incrementally. Some existing services were fully replaced by AWS services. This not only saved on infrastructure costs but also reduced the administrative effort.

During the project, our team committed to comprehensive consulting for the customer and served as a co-pilot for Weltbild. This meant our team ran training sessions and workshops on the newly introduced working methods and technologies. It also became clear that the agile methods introduced helped complete the project within the required timeframe. Weltbild now has a new, agile foundation of methods and tools that follow-up projects can build on.

Further additional, positive side effects of the cloud redesign during the migration include:

• Fewer on-call incidents
• Improved service and infrastructure stability through self-healing mechanisms
• An overview of live cloud costs and a forecast of future costs
• Separation of management and infrastructure team cloud accounts