Cloud / AWS Success Story
Cloud-to-Cloud Webshop Migration with Cloud Native Redesign
Hard facts of the project
Products used
AWS, plus Route53, CloudFormation, NLB (Network Log Balancer), Puppet, Ansible, Gitlab, Graphana / Prometheus
Solution and Methology
Agile Sprint planning, GitFlow, Infrastructure as Code as well as Configuration as Code, Containerization, Introduction and Workshops on DevSecOps
About Weltbild
At Weltbild we are a Publishing and bookstore company with headquarters in Augsburg as well as a large multi-channel bookseller. Weltbild serves customers through online shops, direct marketing and its own branches. To reduce costs and increase flexibility, a migration of the Weltbild webshop via AWS has taken place.
Core problem and Opportunities for Improvement
Most companies are taking their first steps towards the cloud for a variety of reasons: UTo save costs by having your own operating department in the IT infrastructuren, to react faster and more flexibly to future changes and to make it easier to perform generation updates of hardware. In addition, long-term capacity planning for infrastructure is not necessary in the cloud. For these reasons, Weltbild decided to move to the AWS Cloud.
The first implementation took place with the webshop of Weltbild.de. webshop takes place. A move to the cloud generally offers the opportunity to achieve lower maintenance costs and greater flexibility. However, it must be taken into account at this point that the hoped-for change after a move of the infrastructure with the "lift and shift" mentality, cannot be achieved automatically. Quite the opposite is often the reality: the realization of these desired results requires effort and prior knowledge in the area of infrastructure redesign as well as the available cloud services.
Based on this knowledge, Weltbild initiated a new project. The main tasks consisted of (1) a renewed relocation of the infrastructurethis time, however, in (2) combination with a Cloud-Redesign and a (3) flexible workflow. The biggest challenge in the implementation was the very strict deadline. If the deadline had been missed, it would have meant that Weltbild would have been bound to the legacy-cloud and would ultimately have had to pay for infrastructure that they would not use.
This is exactly the point where our XALT DevOps team was assigned. The goal was to accelerate the planned project and bring in additional expertise related to AWS-specific Technologies as well as Infrastructure and Configuration as Code. This allowed us to ensure that the full infrastructure migration was completed on time, considering the new project goals.
Finding solutions and introducing new methods
The first challenge was to define all necessary steps of the migration and to layout a roadmap. This had two purposes in the project: On the one hand, the project management team receives a project overview and an illustration of identified risks that could influence the deadline. On the other hand, the project team receives defined goals that enable the project to be carried out in the given period. With this foundation, the Weltbild team could be offered the necessary support to manage the cloud migration with agile methods. Our DevOps team advised Weltbild on the path to implementation and introduced new techniques and a DevSecOps mentality to the team. These included:
- Planning of all necessary Epics and Tools
- Support via a Scrum Master/ Product Owner on technical cloud topics
- Implementation of Team workshops for the use of the new tools and techniques
- Improvement of teamwork and communication
- Implementation of a live project status for management
- Automated deployments
- Creation of a multi-account cloud environment
Stepwise implementation and other uses
In the next step, the Cloud-to-Cloud migration of the Webshop was implemented. The services were divided into single microservices, described as infrastructure as code and finally incrementally migrated. Several of the available services were replaced completely by AWS services. That way, not only infrastructure costs could be saved, but also the administrative effort could be reduced.
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An incremental migration made it possible to redesign individual services and finally migrate these capabilities to the new infrastructure platform. From then on, these were integrated into the entire application.
During the implementation of the project, our team committed itself to providing comprehensive advice to the customer and served Weltbild as a co-pilot. This means that our team has carried out training courses and workshops on the newly introduced techniques and technologies. In addition, it became clear that the agile methods introduced contributed to carrying out the project in the required time period. Weltbild now has a new, agile base of techniques and tools on which to build follow-up projects.
Further additional, positive side effects of the Cloud redesign during the migration are:
- Reduction of on-call duty
- Improvement of service and infrastructure stability via self-healing mechanisms
- Overview of Live-Cloud Costs as well as projection of future costs
- Separation of management and infrastructure team cloud accounts
More information
Want to learn more about the Cloud-to-Cloud Migration Success Story? Feel free to contact us for a free consultation.
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