Challenge
Hobsons, a leader in the EdTech industry, wanted to migrate all their applications from an on-premises data center to AWS (Amazon Web Services) in order to reap the benefits of cloud computing.
Solution
Our Work Involved AWS migration of 14 applications and 50+ terabytes of files Using Terraform and CloudFormation to provision separate development Configuring Jenkins CI to support continuous integration and delivery Building AMIs using Packer and Ansible Deploying application code onto CentOS Linux servers. Configuring Aurora for heightened data security. Estimating the TCO Modus Create's team of consultants worked together with Hobsons to manage the entire process of migration. The first step was to evaluate whether the project was feasible by calculating its TCO. After calculating the charges for EC2, S3, ELB, and Aurora, the team concluded that the TCO was an acceptable alternative to existing investment in the self-hosted data center. In addition to the actual costs, the result also took into account the potential benefits of AWS including elastic computing capacity and redundancy. Building the Solution Now that it was clear that AWS migration is a viable alternative, the next step was to architect and implement a multi-layered solution. The team used two powerful cloud infrastructure management tools - Terraform and CloudFormation to provision separate development, test, staging, and production environments in AWS. Each application stack used an Auto Scaling Group hooked up to an Elastic Load Balancer or Application Load Balancer, supported by shared Elasticache memcached servers and a MySQL Aurora cluster. Next, they configured horizontally scalable Jenkins CI infrastructure in AWS to support orchestration and used it to perform builds, tests, and deployments. Prioritizing Security For the project to be successful, scalability alone wasn't good enough. The new solution had to be more stable and secure than the on-premises data center. To prioritize security, the team built AMIs using Packer and Ansible, and then wrote CodeDeploy scripts to package and deploy application code onto CentOS Linux servers. They configured Aurora to perform MySQL backups automatically for data security. Elastic IPs allocated to NAT gateways allowed third parties to whitelist services originating from the cluster. The baseline images were hardened using the CIS benchmark and integrated AWS WAF to provide an additional layer of defense.
Results
Reduction in operational costs Improved security posture with AWS WAF and Aurora. MySQL backups for data hosting and security on the cloud. Transactions per Minute - 30,000 Major Outages in Migration - 0
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