cloud case study examples

10 Important Cloud Migration Case Studies You Need to Know

Aug 1, 2019 | Engineering

For most businesses considering cloud migration, the move is filled with promise and potential. Scalability, flexibility, reliability, cost-effectiveness, improved performance and disaster recovery, and simpler, faster deployment — what’s not to like? 

It’s important to understand that cloud platform benefits come alongside considerable challenges, including the need to improve availability and latency, auto-scale orchestration, manage tricky connections, scale the development process effectively, and address cloud security challenges. While advancements in virtualization and containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) are helping many businesses solve these challenges, cloud migration is no simple matter. 

That’s why, when considering your organization’s cloud migration strategy, it’s beneficial to look at case studies and examples from other companies’ cloud migration experiences. Why did they do it? How did they go about it? What happened? What benefits did they see, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing for these businesses? Most importantly, what lessons did they learn — and what can you learn from them? 

With that in mind, Distillery has put together 10 cloud migration case studies your business can learn from. While most of the case studies feature companies moving from on-premise, bare metal data centers to cloud, we also look at companies moving from cloud to cloud, cloud to multi-cloud, and even off the cloud. Armed with all these lessons, ideas, and strategies, you’ll feel readier than ever to make the cloud work for your business.

Challenges for Cloud Adoption: Is Your Organization Ready to Scale and Be Cloud-first?

We examine several of these case studies from a more technical perspective in our white paper on Top Challenges for Cloud Adoption in 2019 . In this white paper, you’ll learn:

• Why cloud platform development created scaling challenges for businesses
• How scaling fits into the big picture of the Cloud Maturity Framework
• Why advancements in virtualization and containerization have helped businesses solve these scaling challenges
• How companies like Betabrand, Shopify, Spotify, Evernote, Waze, and others have solved these scaling challenges while continuing to innovate their businesses and provide value to users

#1 Betabrand : Bare Metal to Cloud

Betabrand (est. 2005) is a crowd-funded, crowd-sourced retail clothing e-commerce company that designs, manufactures, and releases limited-quantity products via its website. 

Migration Objective 

The company struggled with the maintenance difficulties and lack of scalability of the bare metal infrastructure supporting their operations. 

Planning for and adding capacity took too much time and added costs. They also needed the ability to better handle website traffic surges.

Migration Strategy and Results 

In anticipation of 2017’s Black Friday increased web traffic, Betabrand migrated to a Google Cloud infrastructure managed by Kubernetes (Google Kubernetes Engine, or GKE). They experienced no issues related to the migration, and Black Friday 2017 was a success. 

By Black Friday 2018, early load testing and auto-scaling cloud infrastructure helped them to handle peak loads with zero issues. The company hasn’t experienced a single outage since migrating to the cloud.

Key Takeaways

• With advance planning, cloud migration can be a simple process. Betabrand’s 2017 on-premise to cloud migration proved smooth and simple. In advance of actual migration, they created multiple clusters in GKE and performed several test migrations, thereby identifying the right steps for a successful launch.
• Cloud streamlines load testing. Betabrand was able to quickly create a replica of its production services that they could use in load testing. Tests revealed poorly performing code paths that would only be revealed by heavy loads. They were able to fix the issues before Black Friday. 
• Cloud’s scalability is key to customer satisfaction. As a fast-growing e-commerce business, Betabrand realized they couldn’t afford the downtime or delays of bare metal. Their cloud infrastructure scales automatically, helping them avoid issues and keep customers happy. This factor alone underlines the strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations like Betabrand. 

#2 Shopify : Cloud to Cloud

Shopify (est. 2006) provides a proprietary e-commerce software platform upon which businesses can build and run online stores and retail point-of-sale (POS) systems. 

Shopify wanted to ensure they were using the best tools possible to support the evolution needed to meet increasing customer demand. Though they’d always been a cloud-based organization, building and running their e-commerce cloud with their own data centers, they sought to capitalize on the container-based cloud benefits of immutable infrastructure to provide better support to their customers. Specifically, they wanted to ensure predictable, repeatable builds and deployments; simpler and more robust rollbacks; and elimination of configuration management drift. 

By building out their cloud with Google, building a “Shop Mover” database migration tool, and leveraging Docker containers and Kubernetes, Shopify has been able to transform its data center to better support customers’ online shops, meeting all their objectives. For Shopify customers, the increasingly scalable, resilient applications mean improved consistency, reliability, and version control.

• Immutable infrastructure vastly improves deployments. Since cloud servers are never modified post-deployment, configuration drift — in which undocumented changes to servers can cause them to diverge from one another and from the originally deployed configuration — is minimized or eliminated. This means deployments are easier, simpler, and more consistent.
• Scalability is central to meeting the changing needs of dynamic e-commerce businesses. Shopify is home to online shops like Kylie Cosmetics, which hosts flash sales that can sell out in 20 seconds. Shopify’s cloud-to-cloud migration helped its servers flex to meet fluctuating demand, ensuring that commerce isn’t slowed or disrupted.

#3 Spotify: Bare Metal to Cloud

Spotify (est. 2006) is a media services provider primarily focused on its audio-streaming platform, which lets users search for, listen to, and share music and podcasts.

Spotify’s leadership and engineering team agreed: The company’s massive in-house data centers were difficult to provision and maintain, and they didn’t directly serve the company’s goal of being the “best music service in the world.” They wanted to free up Spotify’s engineers to focus on innovation. They started planning for migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in 2015, hoping to minimize disruption to product development, and minimize the cost and complexity of hybrid operation. 

Spotify invested two years pre-migration in preparing, assigning a dedicated Spotify/Google cloud migration team to oversee the effort. Ultimately, they split the effort into two parts, services and data, which took a year apiece. For services migration, engineering teams moved services to the cloud in focused two-week sprints, pausing on product development. For data migration, teams were allowed to choose between “forklifting” or rewriting options to best fit their needs. Ultimately, Spotify’s on-premise to cloud migration succeeded in increasing scalability while freeing up developers to innovate. 

• Gaining stakeholder buy-in is crucial. Spotify was careful to consult its engineers about the vision. Once they could see what their jobs looked like in the future, they were all-in advocates. 
• Migration preparation shouldn’t be rushed. Spotify’s dedicated migration team took the time to investigate various cloud strategies and build out the use case demonstrating the benefits of cloud computing to the business. They carefully mapped all dependencies. They also worked with Google to identify and orchestrate the right cloud strategies and solutions. 
• Focus and dedication pay huge dividends. Spotify’s dedicated migration team kept everything on track and in focus, making sure everyone involved was aware of past experience and lessons already learned. In addition, since engineering teams were fully focused on the migration effort, they were able to complete it more quickly, reducing the disruption to product development.

#4 Evernote : Bare Metal to Cloud

Evernote (est. 2008) is a collaborative, cross-platform note-taking and task management application that helps users capture, organize, and track ideas, tasks, and deadlines.

Evernote, which had maintained its own servers and network since inception, was feeling increasingly limited by its infrastructure. It was difficult to scale, and time-consuming and expensive to maintain. They wanted more flexibility, as well as to improve Evernote’s speed, reliability, security, and disaster recovery planning. To minimize service disruption, they hoped to conduct the on-premise to cloud migration as efficiently as possible. 

Starting in 2016, Evernote used an iterative approach : They built a strawman based on strategic decisions, tested its viability, and rapidly iterated. They then settled on a cloud migration strategy that used a phased cutover approach, enabling them to test parts of the migration before committing. They also added important levels of security by using GCP service accounts , achieving “encryption at rest,” and improving disaster recovery processes. Evernote successfully migrated 5 billion notes and 5 billion attachments to GCP in only 70 days. 

• Cloud migration doesn’t have to happen all at once. You can migrate services in phases or waves grouped by service or user. Evernote’s phased cutover approach allowed for rollback points if things weren’t going to according to plan, reducing migration risk. 
• Ensuring data security in the cloud may require extra steps. Cloud security challenges may require extra focus in your cloud migration effort. Evernote worked with Google to create the additional security layers their business required. GCP service accounts can be customized and configured to use built-in public/private key pairs managed and rotated daily by Google.
• Cloud capabilities can improve disaster recovery planning. Evernote wanted to ensure that they would be better prepared to quickly recover customer data in the event of a disaster. Cloud’s reliable, redundant, and robust data backups help make this possible. 

#5 Etsy : Bare Metal to Cloud

Etsy (est. 2005) is a global e-commerce platform that allows sellers to build and run online stores selling handmade and vintage items and crafting supplies.

Etsy had maintained its own infrastructure from inception. In 2018, they decided to re-evaluate whether cloud was right for the company’s future. In particular, they sought to improve site performance, engineering efficiency, and UX. They also wanted to ensure long-term scalability and sustainability, as well as to spend less time maintaining infrastructure and more time executing strategy.

Migration Strategy and Results

Etsy undertook a detailed vendor selection process , ultimately identifying GCP as the right choice for their cloud migration strategy . Since they’d already been running their own Kubernetes cluster inside their data center, they already had a partial solution for deploying to GKE. They initially deployed in a hybrid environment (private data center and GKE), providing redundancy, reducing risk, and allowing them to perform A/B testing. They’re on target to complete the migration and achieve all objectives. 

Key Takeaways 

• Business needs and technology fit should be periodically reassessed. While bare metal was the right choice for Etsy when it launched in 2005, improvements in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) made cloud migration the right choice in 2018.
• Detailed analysis can help businesses identify the right cloud solution for their needs. Etsy took a highly strategic approach to assessment that included requirements definition, RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) matrices, and architectural reviews. This helped them ensure that their cloud migration solution would genuinely help them achieve all their goals.
• Hybrid deployment can be effective for reducing cloud migration risk. Dual deployment on their private data center and GKE was an important aspect of Etsy’s cloud migration strategy. 

#6 Waze : Cloud to Multi-cloud

Waze (est. 2006; acquired by Google in 2013) is a GPS-enabled navigation application that uses real-time user location data and user-submitted reports to suggest optimized routes.

Though Waze moved to the cloud very early on, their fast growth quickly led to production issues that caused painful rollbacks, bottlenecks, and other complications. They needed to find a way to get faster feedback to users while mitigating or eliminating their production issues.  

Waze decided to run an active-active architecture across multiple cloud providers — GCP and Amazon Web Services (AWS) — to improve the resiliency of their production systems. This means they’re better-positioned to survive a DNS DDOS attack, or a regional or global failure. An open source continuous delivery platform called Spinnaker helps them deploy software changes while making rollbacks easy and reliable. Spinnaker makes it easy for Waze’s engineers to deploy across both cloud platforms, using a consistent conceptual model that doesn’t rely on detailed knowledge of either platform .  

• Some business models may be a better fit for multiple clouds. Cloud strategies are not one-size-fits-all. Waze’s stability and reliability depends on avoiding downtime, deploying quick fixes to bugs, and ensuring the resiliency of their production systems. Running on two clouds at once helps make it all happen. 
• Your engineers don’t necessarily have to be cloud experts to deploy effectively. Spinnaker streamlines multi-cloud deployment for Waze such that developers can focus on development, rather than on becoming cloud experts. 

Deploying software more frequently doesn’t have to mean reduced stability/reliability. Continuous delivery can get you to market faster, improving quality while reducing risk and cost.

#7 AdvancedMD : Bare Metal to Cloud

AdvancedMD (est. 1999) is a software platform used by medical professionals to manage their practices, securely share information, and manage workflow, billing, and other tasks. 

AdvancedMD was being spun off from its parent company, ADP; to operate independently, it had to move all its data out of ADP’s data center. Since they handle highly sensitive, protected patient data that must remain available to practitioners at a moment’s notice, security and availability were top priorities. They sought an affordable, easy-to-manage, and easy-to-deploy solution that would scale to fit their customers’ changing needs while keeping patient data secure and available.

AdvancedMD’s on-premise to cloud migration would avoid the need to hire in-house storage experts, save them and their customers money, ensure availability, and let them quickly flex capacity to accommodate fluctuating needs. It also offered the simplicity and security they needed. Since AdvancedMD was already running NetApp storage arrays in its data center, it was easy to use NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP to move their data to AWS. ONTAP also provides the enterprise-level data protection and encryption they require.

• Again, ensuring data security in the cloud may require extra steps. Though cloud has improved or mitigated some security concerns (e.g., vulnerable OS dependencies, long-lived compromised servers), hackers have turned their focus to the vulnerabilities that remain. Thus, your cloud migration strategy may need extra layers of controls (e.g., permissions, policies, encryption) to address these cloud security challenges.
• When service costs are a concern, cloud’s flexibility may help. AdvancedMD customers are small to mid-sized budget-conscious businesses. Since cloud auto-scales, AdvancedMD never pays for more cloud infrastructure than they’re actually using. That helps them keep customer pricing affordable.

#8 Dropbox : Cloud to Hybrid

Dropbox (est. 2007) is a file hosting service that provides cloud storage and file synchronization solutions for customers.

Dropbox had developed its business by using the cloud — specifically, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) — to house data while keeping metadata housed on-premise. Over time, they began to fear they’d become overly dependent on Amazon: not only were costs increasing as their storage needs grew, but Amazon was also planning a similar service offering, Amazon WorkDocs. Dropbox decided to take back their storage to help them reduce costs, increase control, and maintain their competitive edge. 

While the task of moving all that data to an in-house infrastructure was daunting, the company decided it was worth it — at least in the US (Dropbox assessed that in Europe, AWS is still the best fit). Dropbox designed in-house and built a massive network of new-breed machines orchestrated by software built with an entirely new programming language, moving about 90% of its files back to its own servers . Dropbox’s expanded in-house capabilities have enabled them to offer Project Infinite, which provides desktop users with universal compatibility and unlimited real-time data access.

• On-premise infrastructure may still be right for some businesses. Since Dropbox’s core product relies on fast, reliable data access and storage, they need to ensure consistently high performance at a sustainable cost. Going in-house required a huge investment, but improved performance and reduced costs may serve them better in the long run. Once Dropbox understood that big picture, they had to recalculate the strategic importance of cloud computing to their organization.  
• Size matters. As Wired lays out in its article detailing the move , cloud businesses are not charities. There’s always going to be margin somewhere. If a business is big enough — like Dropbox — it may make sense to take on the difficulties of building a massive in-house network. But it’s a huge risk for businesses that aren’t big enough, or whose growth may stall.

#9 GitLab : Cloud to Cloud

GitLab (est. 2011) is an open core company that provides a single application supporting the entire DevOps life cycle for more than 100,000 organizations. 

GitLab’s core application enables software development teams to collaborate on projects in real time, avoiding both handoffs and delays. GitLab wanted to improve performance and reliability, accelerating development while making it as seamless, efficient, and error-free as possible. While they acknowledged that Microsoft Azure had been a great cloud provider, they strongly believed that GCP’s Kubernetes was the future, calling it “a technology that makes reliability at massive scale possible.” 

In 2018, GitLab migrated from Azure to GCP so that GitLab could run as a cloud-native application on GKE. They used their own Geo product to migrate the data, initially mirroring the data between Azure and GCP. Post-migration, GitLab reported improved performance (including fewer latency spikes) and a 61% improvement in availability.    

• Containers are seen by many as the future of DevOps. GitLab was explicit that they view Kubernetes as the future. Indeed, containers provide notable benefits, including a smaller footprint, predictability, and the ability to scale up and down in real time. For GitLab’s users, the company’s cloud-to-cloud migration makes it easier to get started with using Kubernetes for DevOps.
• Improved stability and availability can be a big benefit of cloud migration. In GitLab’s case, mean-time between outage events pre-migration was 1.3 days. Excluding the first day post-migration, they’re up to 12 days between outage events. Pre-migration, they averaged 32 minutes of downtime weekly; post-migration, they’re down to 5. 

#10 Cordant Group : Bare Metal to Hybrid

The Cordant Group (est. 1957) is a global social enterprise that provides a range of services and solutions, including recruitment, security, cleaning, health care, and technical electrical.

Over the years, the Cordant Group had grown tremendously, requiring an extensive IT infrastructure to support their vast range of services. While they’d previously focused on capital expenses, they’d shifted to looking at OpEx, or operational expenses — which meant cloud’s “pay as you go” model made increasing sense. It was also crucial to ensure ease of use and robust data backups.

They began by moving to a virtual private cloud on AWS , but found that the restriction to use Windows DFS for file server resource management was creating access problems. NetApp Cloud ONTAP, a software storage appliance that runs on AWS server and storage resources, solved the issue. File and storage management is easier than ever, and backups are robust, which means that important data restores quickly. The solution also monitors resource costs over time, enabling more accurate planning that drives additional cost savings. 

• Business and user needs drive cloud needs. That’s why cloud strategies will absolutely vary based on a company’s unique needs. The Cordant Group needed to revisit its cloud computing strategy when users were unable to quickly access the files they needed. In addition, with such a diverse user group, ease of use had to be a top priority.
• Cloud ROI ultimately depends on how your business measures ROI. The strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations is specific to each organization. Cloud became the right answer for the Cordant Group when OpEx became the company’s dominant lens. 

Which Cloud Migration Strategy Is Right for You?

As these 10 diverse case studies show, cloud strategies are not one-size-fits all. Choosing the right cloud migration strategy for your business depends on several factors, including your:

• Goals. What business results do you want to achieve as a result of the migration? How does your business measure ROI? What problems are you trying to solve via your cloud migration strategy? 
• Business model. What is your current state? What are your core products/services and user needs, and how are they impacted by how and where data is stored? What are your development and deployment needs, issues, and constraints? What are your organization’s cost drivers? How is your business impacted by lack of stability or availability? Can you afford downtime? 
• Security needs. What are your requirements regarding data privacy, confidentiality, encryption, identity and access management, and regulatory compliance? Which cloud security challenges pose potential problems for your business?
• Scaling needs. Do your needs and usage fluctuate? Do you expect to grow or shrink? 
• Disaster recovery and business continuity needs. What are your needs and capabilities in this area? How might your business be impacted in the event of a major disaster — or even a minor service interruption? 
• Technical expertise. What expertise do you need to run and innovate your core business? What expertise do you have in-house? Are you allocating your in-house expertise to the right efforts? 
• Team focus and capacity. How much time and focus can your team dedicate to the cloud migration effort? 
• Timeline. What business needs constrain your timeline? What core business activities must remain uninterrupted? How much time can you allow for planning and testing your cloud migration strategy? 

Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive. These questions are only a starting point. But getting started — with planning, better understanding your goals and drivers, and assessing potential technology fit — is the most important step of any cloud migration process. We hope these 10 case studies have helped to get you thinking in the right direction. 

While the challenges of cloud migration are considerable, the right guidance, planning, and tools can lead you to the cloud strategies and solutions that will work best for your business. So don’t delay: Take that first step to helping your business reap the potential advantages and benefits of cloud computing. 

Ready to take the next step on your cloud journey? As a Certified Google Cloud Technology Partner , Distillery is here to help. Download our white paper on top challenges for cloud adoption to get tactical and strategic about using cloud to transform your business.  

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Oracle’s technical case studies dive deeper into real-world customer deployments. Discover how OCI is helping customers successfully deliver 24/7 operations using geographically distributed architectures, elastic scaling, and optimally secure applications. OCI engineering works with customers to move from idea to execution rapidly, defining the implementation path, and introducing techniques and best practices to accelerate customer deployment.

Featured OCI technical case studies

PRIO Energy is an electric energy provider. Looking to modernize its ERP system, PRIO turned to Oracle for its cloud-based automation platform. PRIO leveraged OCI Application Integration to deliver a multicloud application network solution that connected fueling stations with its ERP system. As a result, PRIO provided visibility into all transactions and offered a secure way to manage its multicloud integrations.

3i-Infotech, a Mumbai-based IT company, needed a reliable cloud partner to help bring its virtual desktop platform to market. 3i-Infotech selected OCI for its ability to provide low latency, high availability, and robust security. With its platform on OCI, 3i-Infotech’s customers can share files safely, use any device on any network, and disseminate information using secure edge devices.

Star CRM is a Singapore-based provider of CRM software. The company previously hosted its CRM solutions on AWS, but faced challenges around database management, performance, and licensing complexity. After migrating its systems to OCI, Star CRM reports 40% productivity gains, 30% overall cost reductions, and 50% savings on licensing costs.

See OCI case studies

Technical case studies highlight the customer’s goals and the breadth and depth of their technical solution on OCI. Each technical case study features all applicable OCI products used, the customer’s cloud migration path, OCI solution architecture, and the results of their cloud transformation.

• Oracle Red Bull Racing
• The University of Melbourne
• Forth Smart
• Takamol Holding
• APL Logistics
• Integra LifeSciences

Oracle Red Bull Racing runs more than 1 billion race strategy simulations on OCI

The UK-based Formula One team needed a platform that could simulate billions of potential outcomes related to variables, such as weather conditions, pit stop times, and race crashes. During 2021, Oracle Red Bull Racing migrated their strategy systems from their preexisting infrastructure to OCI.

• Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes
• High performance computing (HPC)
• Increased the number of simulations by 25%
• Improved the accuracy and speed of their predictions
• Accelerated simulation processing speeds by containerizing their simulation application
• Reduced overall infrastructure costs

The team’s 2022 season will further expand the use of OCI across its most significant area of operation including analytics-based race strategy and improving fan engagement.

IFFCO modernizes its IT estate with OCI, helping shape the future of agriculture in India

Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Ltd. (IFFCO) is the world’s largest manufacturer and marketer of fertilizers in the cooperative sector. IFFCO has worked with Oracle for more than two decades on their business-critical applications and databases. Most recently, IFFCO needed all of its systems, consisting of more than 100 applications, to be highly available. IFFCO partnered with Oracle to modernize their IT estate and provide maximized technological benefits to all stakeholders.

• OCI Compute
• Oracle Exadata Cloud service
• Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS)
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• OCI Load Balancing
• OCI Web Application Firewall (WAF)
• OCI FastConnect
• A completed migration in 57 hours for Oracle E-Business Suite and 33 hours for custom applications
• Improved overall performance by 7X
• Better IT management
• Enhanced security
• Automated scaling for workloads during peak and off-peak seasons

As IFFCO aims to shape the future of the Indian agriculture industry, Oracle technology remains at the forefront of its roadmap.

University of Melbourne deploys Arm-based containers for fog computing

The University of Melbourne is a public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Its researchers needed to build its open source framework on a platform that’s multicloud, widely available, and secure. After moving its FogBus2 platform onto OCI, the university’s computer science researchers throughout Australia are able to capture, analyze, and make predictions from Internet of Things (IoT) data.

• Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Virtual cloud networks (VCNs) and subnets
• Security lists
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• OCI Bastion
• Autonomous Data Warehouse
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• Increased performance and response times in applications by 20%
• Increased service startup time by 15% compared to other architectures
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• Improved scalability of CPU storage needed for IoT workloads

In the future, the university plans on leveraging OCI to improve the functionality of its FogBus2 platform by integrating container-orchestration techniques to automate management, along with other enhancements.

OCI and Maplesoft partnership creates digital twin virtual environment for modernized, real-time asset monitoring

Maplesoft is a leading provider of advanced modeling and calculation solutions for engineering, science, and mathematics. One of the company’s primary products is MapleSim, a flexible, multidomain platform that enables designers to create a virtual prototype. Looking to improve scalability and performance, Maplesoft saw an opportunity to work with OCI as a cloud partner to add capabilities to the simulations when applied to a fleet. By partnering with OCI, Maplesoft can extend the use of its MapleSim machine-level digital models to create digital twins that can scale up to represent a fleet of assets.

• OCI Object Storage
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• OCI Anomaly Detection
• Ability to build a physics-based simulation of complex assets using MapleSim and to use that model during asset monitoring
• Ability to detect anomalies in real time (less than 0.2 seconds), allowing corrective action to be quickly determined with MapleSim
• Fast restoration of optimal business performance with OCI Anomaly Detection
• Improved scalability and latency for digital twin deployment

By partnering with OCI, Maplesoft is helping its customers better predict potential disruptions and optimize operational costs.

Thai conglomerate Forth Smart uses OCI, Autonomous Database, and Oracle Analytics to increase ad conversion rates by 3X

Forth Smart is a Thai service provider specializing in a wide range of financial payment services. Needing to automate manual processes, Forth Smart was looking for a cloud provider that offered IaaS, analytics, and machine learning. After evaluating other providers, the company chose Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, running on OCI without a database administrator. By partnering with OCI, Forth Smart was able to retrieve data in real time, reduce manual database administration, and easily create reports and data visualizations. Forth Smart leveraged the following services:

• Oracle Analytics
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• Reduced the average query time from 3 hours to 2 minutes
• Improved its customer advertisement conversion rates by 3X
• Reduced its IT and database administration costs
• Gained access to real-time analytics for its more than 120,000 kiosk network

In the future, Forth Smart plans on leveraging Oracle’s more than 40 global cloud regions to move existing workloads from Ashburn to Singapore.

Takamol Holding adopts OCI and Oracle Kubernetes to boost innovation in Saudi Arabia, delivering high performance egovernment services with dynamic scalability

Takamol Holding is a Saudi Arabia-based government company that aims to serve various labor markets. Having previously used the cloud to manage and deliver workloads, the company needed to quickly find a managed provider that uses Kubernetes, while avoiding vendor lock-in. By leveraging OCI’s many managed services and features, Takamol Holding built out four core applications that streamlined the deployment of its egovernment services.

• Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE)
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• Oracle Database
• Oracle MySQL Database service
• Oracle Database Vault
• Improved the availability of services, reduced operations, and ensured fast disaster recovery
• Accelerated time to deploy IT infrastructure through the infrastructure-as-code (IaC) model
• Reduced the time it took to launch an egovernment service from a day to less than an hour
• Saved hours of maintenance work

In addition, Takamol has been able to meet the data residency and security requirements of the Saudi Arabian government.

APL Logistics modernizes with OCI, cutting costs and improving time to market

APL Logistics Ltd. (APLL) is a Japan-based freight forwarding and transportation company. To ensure business continuity in tandem with accelerating digitization, APLL turned to Oracle to help reinvent the user experience of a legacy online quotation application. The company was looking to automate processes, add self-service capabilities for customers and administrators, and improve overall cost effectiveness.

• Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP)
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
• Oracle Integration Cloud
• Significantly decreased time to market for its self-service quoting application
• Went from project to launch within three months
• Enabled the application team and engineers to focus more on business logic and innovation
• Secured proprietary information and boosted digital transformation efforts

In the future, APLL plans to migrate additional workloads, such as its chatbot service for shipments, payment enquiries, and incident reporting, to OCI.

Now Optics taps Oracle’s artificial intelligence services for insights that improve customer experience

Now Optics is a leading eyeglass retailer that markets in more than 20 states. With business growing, the company had accumulated a large volume of data, but had no tangible way to use that data to optimize the business and expand into new offerings. Now Optics turned to OCI to improve their customer engagement and experience. Now the company can identify the top issues that their customers feel strongly about and use that data for actionable insights.

• Oracle Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• OCI Language
• OCI Data Integration
• Automated the processing of customer feedback
• Improved business efficiency and reduced costs
• Increased customer satisfaction
• Converted unstructured textual context to structured context

Now Optics plans to further use OCI to flag various eye diseases such as glaucoma, diabetes, and cancer by only using pictures of the retina and eye.

SailGP processes 240K data points per second on OCI

SailGP is an international sailing league in which teams compete by sailing high-performance F50 catamarans around the world. With cloud technology in mind, SailGP wanted a provider that could help them better process data in real time to create better analytics and competitive advantages. SailGP’s main goal was to optimize both performance and fan experience. To achieve these goals, SailGP leveraged Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Streaming and Oracle Stream Analytics to process, analyze, and stream data during each race using sophisticated correlation patterns, data enrichment, and machine learning. SailGP enhanced their analytics with the following OCI services:

• Oracle Stream Analytics
• Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage
• Oracle Identity and Access Management
• Oracle Cloud Guard
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure GoldenGate
• Analyze more than 240,000 data points collected from 800 sensors in seconds
• Transfer data from boats to Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse at an average batch size of 20,000 messages, sent every 500 milliseconds
• Enhance the SailGP app by providing racing metrics in real time to crews and fans worldwide
• Detect anomalies and proactively manage the boat’s moving parts

In the future, SailGP plans to use OCI services such as AI and Oracle APEX to further enhance their customer experience and analytics capabilities.

CMRI uses Oracle AI to help cure children’s cancer, improves efficiency by 50%

Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI) is a premier Australian medical research institute and charity. With researchers collaborating across locations, CMRI knew it was time to change the way it historically managed data pipelines. The institute wanted to optimize its processes to improve performance, facilitate seamless collaboration, and get the most out of its data.

• OCI Data Science
• Reduce numerical simulation time from 30 days to 5 days
• Become 50% more efficient with resources
• Save approximately 30% in costs
• Encrypt all data and address key storage workload requirements

Due to its success with OCI, CRMI intends to use OCI Vision and OCI Data Labeling to automate workflows around bounding cells.

• Gadget Software
• Mutual Materials

Cloud native and DevSecOps at scale with Capgemini and Oracle Cloud

Capgemini has been an Oracle Platinum Partner for over two decades, helping customers with projects such as critical migrations and implementations. When a customer approached Capgemini with aging legacy systems, business change requirements, and strict deadlines enforced by a government directive (PSD2), Capgemini turned to Oracle Cloud. Capgemini delivered a rapidly developed, cloud native platform using these products:

• Oracle Identity
• Oracle API Manager
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Registry
• Achieved design to launch in 6 months
• Scaled its testing to 200% of expected maximum user concurrency
• Measured a response time averaging 77ms
• Delivered the PSD2 portal and PSD2 APIs on time and launched the debt register API a week ahead of schedule

The platform serves 300,000 API requests per day.

Gadget Software moves cloud native platform from AWS to OCI, increasing developer efficiency

Gadget Software offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for manufacturers to provide an optimized self-service support solution. The company's AI transforms instructions into intuitive, easy-to-follow information. With several gaps in their previous AWS environment, Gadget Software needed a cloud provider that offered speed, agility, high availability, and automation of manual processes. As a result, Gadget Software migrated their three core technologies to OCI to reduce costs, free up DevOps resources, and improve scalability.

• Oracle bare metal shapes
• OCI virtual cloud network
• Internet gateway
• NAT gateway
• OCI Logging
• OCI Auditing
• Enabled its development team to focus on high-value activities
• Automated management scripts for relational databases
• Reduced capital and operating costs
• Scaling on demand by expanding its compute as needed

With OCI’s capabilities and engineering guidance, Gadget Software is well-equipped to meet the needs of its customers.

HNI modernizes its technology stack with OCI and Flexagon

HNI is a leading manufacturer of workplace furnishings. Like other manufacturers, HNI has faced challenges such as increased demand volatility, rising supply chain costs, and customers that expect instant delivery. To better serve their customers and increase efficiency, HNI utilized an array of OCI services and FlexDeploy, a DevOps platform from Flexagon for end-to-end software development and delivery.

• Flexagon FlexDeploy
• Oracle E-Business Suite
• Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC)
• Oracle Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Achieved a 50% reduction in development costs
• Improved project delivery time by 50%, improving its time to market
• Reduced deployment time by 60X
• Increased developer productivity by 90%
• Reduced deployment-related errors by 98% and decreased support by 2 hours a night

HNI improved agility and efficiency by using cloud technologies from Oracle and Flexagon.

kompany delivers regulatory solutions 3X faster with OCI’s modern lakehouse

kompany enables their clients to automate and transform anti–money laundering compliance into competitive advantages. Their IT team was looking for an easy-to-use, next-generation data lakehouse to automate process flows for data ingestion from a wide range of sources quickly and efficiently. To achieve their cloud migration goals, kompany implemented a cloud native solution on OCI. Their IT team can now load any type of data from a wide range of sources, store it in their data warehouse or data lake, and leverage easy-to-use automation to transform, visualize, and analyze it using a single source of truth.

• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Integration
• Oracle Analytics Cloud
• Reduced costs by 70%
• Achieved a 2X return on investment in 12 months
• Delivered new analytics 3X faster
• Automated their data pipeline without coding

Based on their success running their platform on OCI, kompany plans to triple the number of users by the end of the year and expand usage to seven other departments.

MESTEC launches robust multicloud strategy with Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure Interconnect

MESTEC is the world's first cloud-based SaaS manufacturing solution provider. They offer manufacturing execution system and advanced planning and scheduling software to manufacturers looking to improve efficiencies in critical aspects of the manufacturing lifecycle. The company deployed a multicloud strategy, leveraging solutions from Oracle and Microsoft. They rely on Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing database connected to an Azure front end through the Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure to deliver solutions that boost overall manufacturing processes without customization and typical up-front costs.

• Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing
• Oracle Data Guard
• Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure Interconnect
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect
• Site-to-Site VPN
• OCI Dynamic Routing Gateway (DRG)
• Reduced labor and infrastructure costs by half compared to its on-premises environment
• Ran manufacturing workloads up to 600% faster with half as many CPUs
• Achieved a more secure and 100% compliant environment
• Implemented a diverse set of manufacturing environments quickly and reliably
• Committed higher-availability SLAs to its customers

With OCI, MESTEC optimized their manufacturing lifecycle and scaled to new infrastructure resources rapidly.

Mutual Materials uses OCI to meet a 30% increase in demand

Mutual Materials is a manufacturer of building bricks, blocks, pavers, and stone slabs. Now the largest supplier of masonry and hardscape products in the Pacific Northwest, Mutual Materials has facilities in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. As the demand in hardscape sales skyrocketed, the company needed a faster and more reliable way to process orders, increase production, and ship their finished products to customers. To scale their infrastructure to meet increased demand, Mutual Materials partnered with Doyensys to migrate to OCI. This partnership enabled a rapid lift and shift of legacy systems to the cloud and the implementation of a scalable IT solution.

• OCI virtual machines
• Virtual cloud networks (VCNs)
• OCI Block Volumes
• Oracle Customer Experience (CX)
• Saw an immediate 15% to 20% boost in application speed
• Increased year-over-year sales by nearly 20%
• Experienced zero downtime despite a 30% jump in orders
• Improved operational efficiencies to help drive up average order sizes

Overall, Mutual Materials saw improved productivity, reduced costs, and unconstrained scalability.

Mynet delivers exceptional mobile gaming experience with OCI, cuts costs by 80%

Mynet offers mobile game services by acquiring an existing game title, then redesigning and repackaging it to reach a broader audience. This business model enhances Mynet’s overall profitability and revenue. The company migrated to OCI for superior performance at a lower price and reduced overall costs by about 80%. As part of their multicloud strategy, Mynet also uses services from other cloud providers depending on game characteristics.

• OCI File Storage
• OCI Flexible Load Balancer
• Outbound OCI Data Transfer
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Health Checks
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Email Delivery
• Oracle Cloud Functions
• OCI Internet Gateway
• About 80% reduced infrastructure cost
• Cost savings of over $1M in twelve months
• 6X improved processing time for a title—from about an hour to just 10 minutes
• Specific game titles running automatically and at scale without human intervention
• A unified view of cloud security posture across OCI tenancy

By deploying its mobile gaming experience on OCI, Mynet achieved notable improvements in overall game performance.

retraced deploys sustainability platform on OCI blockchain, improves sales by 400%

retraced is a leading sustainability management platform provider based out of Germany. The company enables their customers to ensure that they’re only using materials that have been manufactured using certifiably sustainable production methods. To build their cloud native platform, retraced wanted a technology environment that offered simplicity in operations, autonomous and managed services, and significant cost savings. After evaluating multiple cloud providers, retraced chose to run their platform on OCI.

• Oracle Blockchain Platform
• Oracle Autonomous JSON Database
• Autonomous Transaction Processing
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute
• OCI Storage
• Achieved 400% growth in sales
• Increased traffic by 750% in 2021
• Went from project start to launch in less than 12 months

With the use of blockchain on OCI, retraced has been able to track sustainability information more accurately, which in turn has helped the company build trust with current and future clients.

UniQreate scales intelligent data extraction product on OCI and saves 20% monthly

UniQreate is a leading data extraction automation company. UniQreate helps customers gain insights from their unstructured data by utilizing AI learning systems, intelligent workflows, and web-enabled interfaces. With their platform, UniQreate helps business users manage their data needs with the most-efficient workflows and the least-intrusive interactions. Needing stronger compute power and more block storage, UniQreate migrated to OCI for higher performance at a lower price, and reduced overall monthly costs by 20%.

• OCI Bare Metal Compute
• Oracle Virtual Cloud Network
• Oracle MySQL Database Service
• 20% monthly savings in infrastructure cost
• Easily scaled the volume and variety of different use cases with ease
• Migrated the entire setup to OCI in four days
• Provided maximum availability and uptime
• Efficiently maintained separate environments in the same region, helping maintain higher control

By migrating to OCI, UniQreate was able to achieve a cost-efficient, seamless, and robust infrastructure for its massive amounts of data extraction.

ETC achieves 300% performance improvement and increased efficiency after migrating to OCI

ETC is a leading intelligent transportation systems and smart mobility provider in the United States. ETC’s riteSuite provides a full range of tolling and mobility functions, from roadside data collection to back-end processing and payments. For their cloud migration project, the company wanted to reduce time to market, improve infrastructure provisioning, and reduce database maintenance by switching to a model that uses infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

• Exadata Cloud Service
• Block Storage
• Object Storage
• Data Transfer Appliance
• Dynamic Routing Gateway (DRG)
• Compartments
• Network Visualizer
• Replaced 90% of legacy infrastructure for ETC’s back-office clients
• Doubled performance by moving to OCI
• Reduced the time spent managing infrastructure to next to zero hours
• Achieved a 300% performance improvement

By moving to OCI, ETC has built a more cost-effective and efficient infrastructure. In the future, the company plans to use OCI’s cloud native technologies to further build out its infrastructure capabilities.

Archaeological Park of Pompeii taps OCI to reopen after COVID-19 lockdown

Following the pandemic, historical site Pompeii reopened using the MyPompeii mobile app, a solution built entirely on OCI with cloud native and API-first principles in mind. Pompeii used these OCI services, SDKs, and frameworks:

• Oracle Blockchain
• Oracle Autonomous Database
• Oracle Functions
• Container Registry (OCIR)
• Oracle Spatial Analytics
• A real-time heat map that enables information for points of interest, facilities, and social distancing
• Complete integration with online ticket sales application TicketOne, so visitors can scan a QR code on their tickets and access all the application’s content
• Visitor feedback through the application, certified through blockchain

The application has been downloaded by 20,000+ visitors in 2021.

Oracle Cloud helps accelerate COVID-19 testing in the US

In the early days of the pandemic, Oracle Consulting built a suite of public health management applications to help collect and analyze the data necessary for government health organizations and the medical community to understand the virus and its spread. Counties using the platform include Tarrant County, the third most populous county in the state of Texas. The platform not only helps Tarrant County’s testing facilities operate more effectively, but also provides valuable information to keep communities safe. These are the services used:

• Oracle APEX
• Oracle API Gateway
• Provide an online form and categorize each respondent’s risk as high, medium, or low
• Schedule appointments for people most likely to contract the coronavirus
• Allow patients to check in using a mobile app and QR code
• Allow patients to check out and provide the necessary data to testing partners
• Make the results from the testing partners available to patients
• Build customized dashboards with augmented and predictive analytics, data visualization, and intelligent insights

The platform provides Tarrant County with valuable information to keep its communities safe and COVID-19 cases down.

AgroScout improves development and DevOps with Oracle Cloud Native Services

AgroScout, a startup in the agritech sector, leveraged Oracle Cloud Native Services to migrate its application to Kubernetes and deliver an automated deployment pipeline. The AgroScout development team can easily manage its application, streamline its CI/CD platform, and achieve better performance on OCI. Facilities operate more effectively, but also provide valuable information to keep communities safe. These are the services used:

• Oracle Cloud Native Services
• Transition from a static application to a dynamic microservice-based app
• Cluster deployment time decreased from 23 hours to 2 minutes
• New version deployment reduced from 24 hours to minutes
• Enhanced ability to query thousands of images in seconds

AgroScout’s machine learning technology relies on OCI’s GPU instances proving the speed & performance that machine-learning workloads demand.

Integra LifeSciences enhances multicloud capabilities with OCI and achieves 90% time savings

Integra LifeSciences is a leading global provider of regenerative and neurosurgical devices and technologies, serving surgeons and hospitals worldwide. Between their outdated on-premises infrastructure and multiple failed migration attempts that disrupted business operations, Integra LifeSciences needed a more performant cloud provider to host their workloads, so they turned to OCI.

• Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure
• Oracle Fusion Cloud Product Lifecycle Management
• Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning
• Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform
• Migrated Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Agile Product Lifecycle Management, and supply chain analytics and complete systems to OCI
• Improved report runtime by 87%, reducing it from an hour and 45 minutes to 13 minutes
• Reduced their general processing window from 8.5 hours to 3.5 hours
• Can now provision an environment in minutes compared to 10 to 14 days
• 90% time savings with in-memory database options

With the help of a proof-to-pilot deployment, Integra LifeSciences migrated more than 140 systems to OCI across environments for development, quality assurance, production, disaster recovery, and special projects.

• Stellar Cyber
• CWT Globelink

Waafi Bank launches their digital-only operations on OCI

Waafi Bank is a value-based bank, living up to the spirit of Waafi, which means faithful, trustworthy, and loyal. They were looking for a secure and robust infrastructure to implement their Core Banking System that would give them the flexibility to match resources to unpredictable demands without a huge capital expenditure investment. The infrastructure also had to be secure and compliant with various standards and regulatory requirements. Waafi Bank turned to OCI for the performance and operational efficiencies that they couldn’t achieve with another cloud provider.

• Oracle Data Safe
• OCI Flexible Network Load Balancer
• Oracle WebLogic Server for OCI
• Oracle Database service
• Oracle Identity Cloud Service
• Rapidly deploy resources to meet demands
• Only pay for what they consume
• Implement deliverables faster and serve customers better
• Optimize costs and boost performance
• Manage day-to-day security and compliance requirements more effectively and efficiently

As an easy-to-operate platform that minimizes downtime, OCI delivered unmatched performance for Oracle workloads with seamless integration across Waafi Bank’s stack.

Stellar Cyber’s SaaS offering delivers a leading SecOps platform powered by OCI

Stellar Cyber provides a security operations software platform to help security teams automatically detect, investigate, and respond to cyberattacks. With Stellar Cyber, organizations quickly respond to attacks to help reduce the impact and risk to the business. To provide these services to their customers, Stellar Cyber knew they needed a trusted cloud partner to run their security platform, and their goal for migrating to OCI was to launch a high-performance, low-latency, and cost-effective SaaS offering of their Open XDR security operations platform.

• OCI Web Application Firewall
• OCI Identity and Access Management
• Scale up the cluster size without worrying about resource availability and network connectivity
• Roll out deployments in multiple regions with a uniform management experience
• Eliminate IT staff, saving them time, money, and resources
• Reduce their overall total cost of ownership and their customers’ costs
• Focus more on application logic

The Stellar Cyber platform running on OCI is a big data application using AI and ML to help identify attacks in real time.

CWT Globelink transforms and delivers critical applications with OCI, APEX, and Autonomous Database

Formed in 1988, CWT Globelink is a global freight forwarder with a network of more than 100 offices in 32 countries. To keep up with their evolving products, CWT Globelink adopted a data-driven strategy with cloud technology at the forefront. Part of this strategy meant that CWT Globelink needed to build an effective, streamlined, and automated CRM application. To do so, the company needed a reliable cloud partner that could offer the technology required to build a modernized and customized client relationship management application, so they turned to OCI.

• OCI Certificates
• Improve price-performance, analytics capabilities, security, and operational efficiencies
• Cut development costs by 14%
• Reduce the cost of system updates and maintenance without any constraints on memory
• Automate previously manual processes

CWT Globelink was able to go live in only three months, and their IT team attributes the quick migration and technical implementation to Oracle’s customer service and engineering team.

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Explore how Specialized Bicycle Components, founded on the principle of performance and fueled by innovation, moved E-Business Suite to OCI.

Learn how Prosperdtx CTO and his IT team use OCI to collect, curate, and analyze health care data of many different types by using Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW).

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Current: Preparing teenagers for financial responsibility

About Current

Current is a financial technology company that offers a debit card and app made for teenagers. The app and card give teens hands-on learning with modern financial tools, and connects them with the people, brands, and experiences they value.

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Current uses google kubernetes engine on google cloud to improve time to market for app development by 400% while eliminating downtime for users of its debit card app., google cloud results.

• Improves time to market for app development by 400%
• Eliminates downtime for customers
• Enables deployment of new services in hours versus days
• Reduces total cloud hosting costs by 60%

80% reduction in error resolution time

When it comes to developing good financial habits, it pays to start early. Talking to teens about money and monitoring how they spend it helps set them up for a more financially sound future and can have long-term implications for the rest of their lives.

Instead of handing teens cash, many parents are using Current , a Visa chip debit card and smartphone app that helps teens learn how to budget money. Teens can set savings goals, check their balances, earn money by completing chores, and even give to charity. Parents can set an automated allowance, create and approve chores, and easily track their children’s spending with real-time alerts.

To grow, Current must keep its app secure, reliable, and high performing. As a startup, the company started by developing and hosting its app on a simple infrastructure, managing virtual machines with manual processes. As its user base surpassed 25,000 daily active customers, Current began to notice performance bottlenecks, particularly with the Neo4j graph database it uses to store and expose relationships among users, family members, and their debit cards and connected banks. Running the database on a shared application server made it difficult to measure the cost of the required CPU time and memory footprint. Current also lacked a robust way to log and profile the database.

Current considered using a hosted Neo4j solution, but worried that it would limit its ability to deploy in different availability zones as the company grew. Current was also concerned that a hosted solution would drastically increase costs.

“Since moving to Google Cloud, we’ve been able to sustainably grow our user base 7x to more than 175,000 users, and we haven’t experienced any downtime for our services. We’ve also received a lot of collaboration and support from Google, which we weren’t getting from other cloud providers.”

After a short stint with another cloud provider, Current decided to build its own graph database cluster on Google Cloud . The highly available implementation—including a monitoring agent and backup agent—came in at half the cost of a hosted solution or alternative cloud provider according to Trevor Marshall, Chief Technology Officer at Current. Once the engineering team saw the power and reliability of Google Cloud, Current began exploring deeper integration with Google Cloud services.

“Since moving to Google Cloud, we’ve been able to sustainably grow our user base 7x to more than 175,000 users, and we haven’t experienced any downtime for our services,” says Trevor. “We’ve also received a lot of collaboration and support from Google, which we weren’t getting from other cloud providers.”

Accelerating time-to-market

Current now hosts most of its applications in Docker containers, including its business-critical GraphQL API, using Google Kubernetes Engine to automate cluster deployment and management of containerized applications while keeping applications available. Container images are stored on Google Container Registry for fast, scalable retrieval. Integrated logging with Google Stackdriver makes it easy to identify issues, and Current can scale up or down as needed to keep performance high and costs low, with zero downtime for users.

“Moving to Google Cloud reduced our error resolution times by 80% and improved our time to market for app development by 400%. We can iterate quickly, find issues, and redeploy. There’s no reason whatsoever to run Kubernetes outside of Google Cloud, because Google does such a good job.”

With a fully managed environment for containerized applications, Current can deploy new services in hours instead of days while keeping its staffing footprint small. When the company does add team members, they can focus on app development instead of managing and troubleshooting infrastructure.

“Moving to Google Cloud reduced our error resolution times by 80% and improved our time to market for app development by 400%,” says Trevor. “We can iterate quickly, find issues, and redeploy. There’s no reason whatsoever to run Kubernetes outside of Google Cloud, because Google does such a good job.”

Current has released a variety of compelling new features since moving to Google Cloud, including a referral program to recruit more customers and an improved notification feed to inspire more conversations about finances between parents and teens. It also restructured its app to highlight users’ favorite features, including a dedicated allowance section and improved chore management. The new app also communicates with Current’s Kubernetes Engine hosted GraphQL API. Current’s use of GraphQL greatly improves performance by minimizing the data that is sent between the app and the backend, and enables Current’s front-end engineers to share code, increasing developer efficiency.

Improving data and network security

As a financial technology company, Current is always focused on providing the highest levels of security for its customers. Google Cloud facilitates the use of encryption to help protect customer data at rest and in transit to help ensure that customer data is safe when outside the physical boundaries not controlled by Google or on behalf of Google.

For publicly accessible applications, Current configures an ingress resource on Kubernetes clusters to make context-aware load balancing decisions. This ingress also provides a reverse proxy function between users and Current's private network. This helps ensure that no external entity can reach Current’s Google Compute Engine instance fleet directly. Google Cloud also provides Current with the means to forward traffic outside of its private without exposing instances to the public Internet. This gives Current the means to utilize other managed services such MongoDB Atlas, while maintaining a trusted platform.

“Security is one of the biggest benefits of Google Cloud and Kubernetes Engine,” says Trevor. “It was easy for us to configure our environment so that we avoid exposing any public IP addresses for our clusters. When we deploy a new service, we have a recipe that observes security best practices.”

“Google Cloud has allowed us to be highly available, scalable, and cost-efficient, helping us grow from an ambitious startup into a financial technology innovator. We’ve built trust with the families we serve because we’ve been able to offer a great experience.”

Powering a digital workforce

When Current was founded in 2015, the company standardized on Google Workspace for communication and collaboration, using tools such as Gmail and Google Docs , Sheets , and Slides to keep productivity high. Google Workspace administration is so easy that Trevor still handles it all, in addition to leading the company’s tech strategy as CTO.

“Our business depends on Google Workspace,” he says. “It’s simple to use, yet feature-rich and very cost effective. Adding new employees takes a couple of minutes, and they can get to work right away. I can’t imagine using anything else.”

Shaping financial futures

By making it easy for teens and parents to manage and talk about money, Current is preparing a new generation to navigate one of the most challenging aspects of adulthood: financial responsibility. The company’s user base is growing by 20% every month with no signs of slowing, and its Android app just began trending on Google Play. Current is also learning to better manage its own finances. “By avoiding the cost of a hosted Neo4j solution and optimizing resource utilization with Kubernetes Engine, we reduced total cloud hosting costs by 60%," adds Trevor.

“Google Cloud has allowed us to be highly available, scalable, and cost-efficient, helping us grow from an ambitious startup into a financial technology innovator,” says Trevor. “We’ve built trust with the families we serve because we’ve been able to offer a great experience.”

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7 best case-studies for migrating from on-premise to cloud.

For most businesses considering cloud migration, it’s essential to understand that cloud platform benefits come alongside considerable challenges, including improving availability and latency, auto-scale orchestration, managing tricky connections, scaling the development process effectively, and addressing cloud security challenges.

A transformation example when moving from On-premise to Cloud

#1 Betabrand: Bare Metal to Cloud

CloudBetabrand  (est. 2005) is a crowd-funded, crowd-sourced retail clothing e-commerce company that designs, manufactures, and releases limited-quantity products via its website.

– Migration objective 

The company struggled with the maintenance difficulties and lack of scalability of the bare metal infrastructure supporting their operations. Planning for and adding capacity took too much time and added costs. They also needed the ability to handle website traffic surges better.

– Key Takeaways

• With planning, cloud migration can be a simple process. Betabrand’s 2017 on-premise to cloud migration proved smooth and simple. Before actual migration, they created multiple clusters in GKE and performed several test migrations, identifying the right steps for a successful launch.
• Cloud streamlines load testing.  Betabrand was able to quickly create a replica of its production services that they could use in load testing. Tests revealed poorly performing code paths that would only be revealed by heavy loads. They could fix the issues before Black Friday.
• Cloud’s scalability is key to customer satisfaction.  As a fast-growing e-commerce business, Betabrand realized they couldn’t afford the downtime or delays of bare metal. Their cloud infrastructure scales automatically, helping them avoid issues and keep customers happy. This factor alone underlines the strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations like Betabrand.

#2 Spotify: Bare Metal to Cloud

Spotify’s leadership and engineering team agreed: The company’s massive in-house data centers were difficult to provision and maintain, and they didn’t directly serve the company’s goal of being the “best music service in the world.” They wanted to free up Spotify’s engineers to focus on innovation. They started planning for migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in 2015, hoping to minimize disruption to product development and minimize the cost and complexity of hybrid operation.

• Gaining stakeholder buy-in is crucial.  Spotify was careful to consult its engineers about the vision. Once they could see what their jobs looked like in the future, they were all-in advocates.
• Migration preparation shouldn’t be rushed.  Spotify’s dedicated migration team took the time to investigate various cloud strategies and build out the use case showing the benefits of cloud computing to the business. They carefully mapped all dependencies. They also worked with Google to identify and orchestrate the right cloud strategies and solutions.
• Focus and dedication pay huge dividends.  Spotify’s dedicated migration team kept everything on track and in focus, making sure everyone involved was aware of experience and lessons already learned. In addition, since engineering teams were fully focused on the migration effort, they could complete it more quickly, reducing the disruption to product development

#3 Waze: Cloud to Multi-cloud

Waze (est. 2006; acquired by Google in 2013) is a GPS-enabled navigation application that uses real-time user location data and user-submitted reports to suggest optimized routes.

Though Waze moved to the cloud very early on, their fast growth quickly led to production issues that caused painful rollbacks, bottlenecks, and other complications. They needed to get faster feedback to users while mitigating or eliminating their production issues.

• Some business models may be a better fit for multiple clouds.  Cloud strategies are not one-size-fits-all. Waze’s stability and reliability depend on avoiding downtime, deploying quick fixes to bugs, and ensuring the resiliency of their production systems. Running on two clouds at once helps make it all happen.
• Your engineers don’t have to be cloud experts to deploy effectively. Spinnaker streamlines multi-cloud deployment for Waze such that developers can focus on development, rather than on becoming cloud experts.
• Deploying software more frequently doesn’t have to mean reduced stability/reliability c ontinuous delivery can get you to market faster, improving quality while reducing risk and cost.

#4 Dropbox: Cloud to Hybrid

Dropbox had developed its business by using the cloud — specifically, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) — to house data while keeping metadata housed on-premise. Over time, they feared they’d become overly dependent on Amazon: not only were costs increasing as their storage needs grew, but Amazon was also planning a similar service offering, Amazon WorkDocs. Dropbox took back their storage to help them reduce costs, increase control, and maintain their competitive edge.

• On-premise infrastructure may still be right for some businesses.  Since Dropbox’s core product relies on fast, reliable data access and storage, they need to ensure consistently high performance at a sustainable cost. Going in-house required an enormous investment, but improved performance and reduced costs may serve them better in the long run. Once Dropbox understood that big picture, they had to recalculate the strategic importance of cloud computing to their organization.
• Size matters.  As  Wired  lays out in  its article detailing the move , cloud businesses are not charities. There’s always going to be a margin, a margin somewhere. If a business is big enough — like Dropbox — it may make sense to take on the difficulties of building a massive in-house network. But tension enormous risk, an enormous risk for businesses that aren’t big enough, or whose growth may stall.

#5 GitLab: Cloud to Cloud

GitLab’s core application enables software development teams to collaborate on projects in real time, avoiding both handoffs and delays. GitLab wanted to improve performance and reliability, accelerating development while making it as seamless, efficient, and error-free as possible. While they acknowledged Microsoft Azure had been a great cloud provider, they strongly believed that GCP’s Kubernetes were the future, calling it “a technology that makes reliability at massive scale possible.”

• Containers are seen by many as the future of DevOps.  GitLab was explicit that they view Kubernetes as the future.   Indeed, containers provide notable benefits, including a smaller footprint, predictability, and the ability to scale up and down in real time. For GitLab’s users, the company’s cloud-to-cloud migration makes it easier to get started with using Kubernetes for DevOps.
• An enormous benefit, improved stability and availability can be an enormous benefit of cloud migration. In GitLab’s case, mean-time between outage events pre-migration was 1.3 days. Excluding the first day post-migration, they’re up to 12 days between outage events. Pre-migration, they averaged 32 minutes of downtime weekly; post-migration, they’re down to 5.

#6 Cordant Group: Bare Metal to Hybrid

– Migration objective

Over the years, the Cordant Group had grown tremendously, requiring an extensive IT infrastructure to support their vast range of services. While they’d previously focused on capital expenses, they’d shifted to looking at OpEx, or operational expenses — which meant cloud’s “pay as you go” model made increasing sense. It was also crucial to ensure ease of use and robust data backups.

• Business and user needs drive cloud needs.  That’s why cloud strategies will absolutely vary based on a company’s unique needs. The Cordant Group needed to revisit its cloud computing strategy when users were unable to quickly access the files they needed. In addition, with such a diverse user group, ease of use had to be a top priority.
• Cloud ROI ultimately depends on how your business measures ROI.  The strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations is specific to each organization. Cloud became the right answer for the Cordant Group when OpEx became the company’s dominant lens.

#7 Shopify: Cloud to Cloud

Shopify wanted to ensure they were using the best tools possible to support the evolution needed to meet increasing customer demand. Though they’d always been a cloud-based organization, building and running their e-commerce cloud with their own data centers, they sought to capitalize on the container-based cloud benefits of immutable infrastructure to provide better support to their customers. Specifically, they wanted to ensure predictable, repeatable builds and deployments; simpler and more robust rollbacks; and elimination of configuration management drift.

• Immutable infrastructure vastly improves deployments.  Since cloud servers are never modified post-deployment, configuration drift — in which undocumented changes to servers can cause them to diverge from one another and from the originally deployed configuration — is minimized or eliminated. This means deployments are easier, simpler, and more consistent.
• Scalability is central to meeting the changing needs of dynamic e-commerce businesses.  Shopify is home to online shops like Kylie Cosmetics, which hosts flash sales that can sell out in 20 seconds. Shopify’s cloud-to-cloud migration helped its servers flex to meet fluctuating demand, ensuring that commerce isn’t slowed or disrupted.

Which Cloud Migration Strategy Is Right for You?

As these 7 case studies show, cloud strategies are not one-size-fits all. Choosing the right cloud migration strategy for your business depends on several factors, including your:

• Goals. What business results do you want to achieve because of the migration? How does your business measure ROI? What problems are you trying to solve via your cloud migration strategy?
• Business model.  What is your current state? What are your core products/services and user needs, and how are they affected by how and where data is stored? What are your development and deployment needs, issues, and constraints? What are your organization’s cost drivers? How is your business affected by lack of stability or availability? Can you afford downtime?
• Security needs.  What are your requirements regarding data privacy, confidentiality, encryption, identity and access management, and regulatory compliance? Which cloud security challenges pose potential problems for your business?
• Scaling needs.  Do your needs and usage fluctuate? Do you expect to grow or shrink?
• Disaster recovery and business continuity needs. What are your needs and capabilities in this area? How might your business be affected in the event of a major disaster — or even a minor service interruption?
• Technical expertise.  What expertise do you need to run and innovate your core business? What expertise do you have in-house? Are you allocating your in-house expertise to the right efforts?
• Team focus and capacity.  How much time and focus can your team dedicate to the cloud migration effort?
• Timeline.  What business needs to constrain your timeline? What core business activities must remain uninterrupted? How much time can you allow for planning and testing your cloud migration strategy?

In short, with the list of questions above and 7 case studies of companies’ successful cloud migrations. You can start with a plan, understanding the goals and desires of your business. Learn the right tools to lead you to cloud strategies and solutions that will work best for your business.

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According to Gartner, by the end of 2021, 70% of organizations worldwide have migrated at least some workloads to the public cloud. Also, Gartner has identified 6 important factors that can derail cloud migration strategies of companies have been identified and they are: Choosing a wrong cloud migration ally, rushed application assessments, setting the wrong emphasis, poor landing zone designs, dependency bottlenecks, and hidden indirect costs. This blog post decodes how CloudThat  has helped its clients to ensure a seamless and cost-effective cloud migration and helped them to meet their business objectives.

Introduction

As organizations scale, customer demand increases rapidly. To meet the increasing demands, organizations tend to opt for newer and advanced cloud technologies. Cloud Service providers are competing today to provide improved reliability and customer experience through their software applications. While adopting new cloud technologies is a challenge, adhering to the budget without compromising the security posture can prove to be next to impossible without an expert.   

CloudThat offers consulting and system integration services to our clients along with cloud migration manages services, and Well-Architected Review (WAR). CloudThat  ensures cloud-delivered systems adhere to the security requirements and compliance standards expected by the customers in a multi-cloud environment .  

Among our various global clients,  A  client who offers a data platform for digital publishers approached us to migrate their infrastructure along with data from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Let us dive deep into the details about the customer challenges, migration process, proposed solutions, outcomes, and architectural diagram description.

Customer Background

Our client is a performance data platform  for digital publishers  that helps marquee publishers like  Futbol  Sites/ BolaVIP ,  Carousell , TSM Games/ BlitZ ,  LaOpinion ,  ElDiario , 1Weather, Times Internet –  Gaana ,  InMobi ,  FrontStory ,  SonyLIV , Zee5, Digit & eBay with use cases around analytics & optimization to help them manage & boost their ad-revenues.  They equip their customers with real-time data and insights to manage and accelerate revenue growth.

Customer Challenge

The client’s  requirements were to migrate their Infrastructure along with data from G oogle Cloud  P latform  to AWS .  All the applications and services which belong  to  GCP should be migrated  to AWS .  To meet the increasing customer demand, the client  wanted to migrate their application  running on GCP  to  the AWS  cloud and  manage the  infrastructure  efficiently .   The client required a robust and world-class infrastructure deployed on the AWS cloud platform to mitigate  the major  challenges.  Managing the current AWS resources and creating new resources with standard practices was a significant challenge for the client. The entire engineering process needed to be changed to improve reliability and customer experience.  The focus was on  cost optimization,  fault-tolerant, and HA (highly available) applications hosted on AWS cloud for a successful IT transformation for the client’s business environment.   

Assessment Process Employed

Our client was keen on building a robust cloud migration methodology to improve reliability and performance, operate more securely, optimize costs, and automate security and thus improve the overall security posture.  Their existing used Dataflow for Batch and Streaming jobs where Batch jobs were infrequent running day by day in Dataflow and Streaming job was running for previous 160 days. They inserted data streams during the transformation from Cloud Pub/Sub to Big Query streaming jobs. We assessed and suggested to them to use the service from the Kinesis data family for data streaming and batch jobs.   

They employed BigQuery for querying on 50 TB of their data and for performing streaming inserts coming from Dataflow. And then that data was queried on the basis of business logic required from Big Query and sent to the application.   

Though for BigQuery we have two options Athena or Redshift in AWS as per the processing requirements. Eventually, we zeroed down on Athena as it will be cheaper than Redshift providing cost optimization benefits.

Business Objectives Identified

• By migrating from GCP to AWS cloud, the customer will be able to avail the value benefits of AWS services and have a secure and reliable cloud computing platform  
• Use of AWS Cloud services for their Analytics and Application requirements  
• Reduce data storage cost  
• Optimize the performance of data analytics.

Our Proposed Solution

• Setup of highly available and scalable application for serving the massive traffic with the help of EC2, ALB, CloudFront  
• Setup of WordPress application on AWS LightSail  
• Setup of RDS DB  
• Configure SNS and SQS for all the topics and subscriptions that belong to Google Pub-Sub.  
• Migrated GCS data to AWS S3.  
• Configure Glue Crawlers on S3 to create the databases and tables for Athena.

Role of AWS in the Proposed Solution

We extensively used employed AWS features and services in deploying the solution. Important ones include:  Amazon Athena,  AWS Glue ,  Amazon S3,  Amazon SNS,  Amazon SQS ,  Amazon EC2 ,  AWS Elastic Load Balancing ,  Amazon CloudFront ,  AWS CloudWatch,  Amazon RDS, and,  Amazon QuickSight

The Project Outcomes

• Cost optimization is achieved by minimizing the service bill that was expensive prior to migration    
• The Core Application is Highly Scalable and Available running on an EC2 server with Load balancing and CDN in place  
• We have migrated GCS buckets to Amazon S3 and used AWS Glue and Athena to work seamlessly  
• The client has started using AWS services for their analytics, such as Amazon Athena, AWS Glue   
• The database tables get updated on an hourly basis  
• The Client application querying on S3 using Amazon Athena, thus helping for cost and performance optimization  
• All the data is archived and stored as backup. 

Architecture Diagram and Design Used

• AWS Architecture Diagram and Design

AWS EC2 instances were used to run and serve the application using the public-facing Application Load balancers and CloudFront as a caching layer. Amazon S3 was used for storing static data and serving that data to Glue Crawlers which is then queried by AWS Athena service. Amazon SNS is used as a publisher to send messages according to the required topics and Amazon SQS is used as a subscriber to send and process data as per the requirements by different application services. We employed Amazon QuickSight to provide BI dashboards and analytics.

2. AWS Architecture Diagram

AWS Lambda is employed to run cron tasks on the tables (AWS Athena) which stores the resultant data on S3. Those S3 insights were processed and served using an Application Load balancer with CloudFront caching.

3. Automation of serving Athena tables with data of previous 30 days from S3

• Deleting partition from the tables which are older than 30 days
• Moving the data files that are deleted from the table to different S3 bucket

4. Highly available and Scalable Architecture and Automation of Athena table Updating Process:

• The web layer is exposed to the internet via the CloudFront caching layer and public-facing internal LoadBalancer. Internal applications run on the EC2 server fleets which are highly scalable and highly available.
• AWS EC2: Serving and writing logs data to S3 every hour.
• Lambda function 1 : XYZ-Production-Job.
• Triggered on S3 push event.
• Start Glue Crawlers according to the name of the table.

Automation Architecture Diagram

5. Automation of Table Deletion from the Temp Database

• CloudWatch Event Rule: trigger the Lambda function daily at 11:30
• Lambda function 1: Delete-Temp-Tables
• Delete and recreate the temp database

Serverless Automation for deleting temporary database

Cloud migration involves capital risks, budget issues, disaster recovery strategy, and many other aspects. During the process, the security posture can be vulnerable and unstable which could lead to potential adversaries. It is recommended to choose an expert third-party vendor to manage your data migration requirements.

CloudThat  is Microsoft Gold Partner, AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, and a Google Cloud Partner and has successfully led many migration projects for our esteemed clients. Get in touch with us for quick results. Feel free to drop a comment or any queries that you have regarding cloud migration, and we will get back to you quickly. To get started, go through our  Expert Advisory  page  and  Managed Services Package  that is  CloudThat ’s  offerings. You can easily get in touch with our highly accomplished team of experts to carry out your migration needs.

Learn more about Cloud Migration Methodology and implementation here: 5 Key Cloud Migration Challenges and Their Proven Solutions

Feel free to drop a comment or any queries that you have regarding cloud migration, and we will get back to you quickly.

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Case studies in cloud migration: netflix, pinterest, and symantec.

In October 2008, Neil Hunt, chief product officer at Netflix, gathered a meeting of a dozen or so of his engineering staffers in The Towering Inferno, the secluded top-floor meeting room at Netflix’s Los Gatos, CA headquarters. The room, which Netflix CEO Reed Hastings occasionally commandeers as his personal office, is away from the main office hustle and bustle of the start-up company, up a flight of stairs and across an outdoor wooden walkway up on the building’s rooftop—the ideal place for big-picture thinking.

Big thoughts were needed, because Netflix had a problem: its backend client architecture was, to put none too fine a term on it, crumbling more than the Colosseum and leaning more than the Tower of Pisa.

“We kept having issues with connections and threads,” Hunt  recalled  at an industry conference in Las Vegas, NV, six years later. “At one point we upgraded the machine to a fantastic $5 million box and it crashed immediately because the extra capacity on the thread pools meant we ran out of connection pools more quickly.”

It was an unenviable position to be in for the firm, which had introduced online streaming of its vast video library the year before. Netflix had just partnered with Microsoft to get its app on the Xbox 360, and had agreed to terms with the manufacturers of Blu-ray players and TV set-top boxes to service their customers. Millions of potential users of a new, game-changing technology were about to encounter what we now know as the multi-billion dollar industry of online video streaming that would transform Netflix from a failing company that mailed DVDs to movie buffs into a television and movie studio that rivaling some of Hollywood’s biggest names.

But, back in 2008, with a backend that couldn’t cope, the public wasn’t about to encounter anything—unless Netflix made some changes.

There were two points of failure in the physical technology, Hunt explained to the conference audience in Las Vegas: The disk array that ran Netflix’s database—a single Oracle database on an array of Blade webservers—and the single box that talked to it.

“We knew we were approaching a point where we needed to make this redundant,” said Hunt. But Netflix hadn’t yet forked out the cash for second data center that would alleviate the problem. “We were vulnerable to those single points of failure.”

“Let’s rethink this completely, go back to first principles, and think about doing it in the cloud.”

That much became abundantly clear in 2008 when the company pushed a piece of firmware to the disk array. It corrupted Netflix’s database, and the company had to spend three days scrambling to recover. (One contemporary news story on the outage—and the customer outrage it sparked—noted that some customers even went back to Blockbuster, which Netflix had made seem decrepit, for their DVDs.) “That wasn’t a total catastrophe because most customers weren’t reliant on the system being up to get value from the service,” explained Hunt—but as Netflix’s DVD mailing arm wound down and its new streaming service caught on, it would become a problem.

“We thought: ‘Let’s rethink this completely, go back to first principles, and think about doing it in the cloud’,” said Hunt.

Over the course of several meetings in The Towering Inferno, Hunt and his team thrashed out a plan that would ensure that database corruption—and the many other issues with connections and threads that seemed to plague the company back in 2008—would never happen again. They’d move to the cloud.

Whether companies are looking to run their applications serving millions of users or to underpin the databases and file servers of multinational businesses, the cloud provides a low-cost, flexible way to ensure reliable IT resources. Firms don’t need to worry about the physical upkeep of their own private data centers storing information; they can build out capacity as and when it’s needed, lowering costs and increasing their adaptability—important features for a young startup with unpredictable (and potentially limitless) growth. It has been a recent boon, born out by technological innovation, that helps power hundreds of thousands of companies, big and small, across the globe.

For Netflix, the move to the cloud proved a prescient decision: between December 2007 and December 2015, the number of hours of content streamed on Netflix increased one thousand times, and the company had eight times as many people signed up to the service at the end of its cloud migration process as it did at the start. Cloud infrastructure was able to stretch to meet this expanding demand while traditional server racks in a data center were not able to (the number of requests per month called through Netflix’s API  outstripped  the capacity of its traditional data center near the end of 2010). It also proved to be a major cost-saving move.

But at the same time, the cloud was still an unproven, young technology. Amazon, the current leader in cloud computing, had only been offering their Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure products since 2006. Caution was required. Netflix started small, moving over a single page onto AWS to make sure the new system worked. “It’s nicely symbolic,” said Hunt. “We recognised that along the way we probably need to hire some new skills, bring in some new talent, and rethink our organisation.” The company chose AWS over alternative public cloud suppliers because of its breadth of features and its scale, as well as the broader variants of APIs that AWS offered.

“When Netflix made the decision to go all-in on the cloud, most people were barely aware the cloud existed.”

Today, the cloud is many companies’ first choice when it comes to storing data and serving their customers. AWS is a $12 billion company, four times bigger than it was in 2013. It has—and has long had—a 40% market share in the public cloud sector, much more than the combined market share of Microsoft, Google and IBM’s cloud offerings combined,  according to data  collated by Synergy Research Group. Those that aren’t utilising the cloud often feel they want to, and are frustrated when they can’t: Four in 10 businesses have critical company data trapped in legacy systems that can’t be accessed or linked to cloud services, according to a survey by market research company Vanson Bourne for commercial software company Snaplogic, while three in four say that their organization misses out on opportunities because of disconnected data. Vendors’ revenue from the sales of infrastructure products—including server, storage and Ethernet switches—for cloud IT topped $8 billion in the first quarter of 2017, according to analysts IDC.

But none of that was the case when Netflix started its great migration, nor was it true when Ruslan Meshenberg started at Netflix in January 2011, two years into Netflix’s big move. As one of the first companies to move its services into the cloud, Netflix was literally writing the rulebook for many of the tasks it was undertaking. Meshenberg was thrown in at the deep end.

“That was the very first set of objectives I was given,” he explains. “A complete data-center-to-cloud migration for a core set of platform services. Day one.”

It involved a lot of outside the box thinking—and plenty of trailblazing. “When Netflix made the decision to go all-in on the cloud, most people were barely aware the cloud existed,” he explains. “We had to find solutions to a lot of problems, at a time when there were not a lot of standard, off-the-shelf solutions.”

And the problems, when tackling such an enormous task as the migration of a company the size of Netflix, were numerous—particularly for a team used to the mindset that their system operated in a physical data center.

“When you’re operating in a data center,” says Meshenberg, “you know all of your servers. Your applications are running only on a particular set of hardware units.” The goal for the company in a physical data center is a simple one: keep the hardware running at all times, at all costs. That’s not the case with the cloud. Your software runs on ephemeral instances that aren’t guaranteed to be up for any particular duration, or at any particular time. “You can either lament that ephemerality and try to counteract it, or you can try and embrace it and say: ‘I’m going to build a reliable, available system on top of something that is not.’”

Which is where Netflix’s famed  Simian Army  comes in. You have to build a system that can fail—in part—while keeping up as a whole. But in order to figure out if your systems have that ability baked into their design, you need to test it.

Netflix built a tool that would self-sabotage its system, and christened it Chaos Monkey. It would be unleashed on the cloud system, wreaking havoc, bringing down aspects of the system as it rampaged around. The notion might seem self-defeating, but it had a purpose. “We decided to simulate the conditions of a crash to make sure that our engineers can architect, write and test software that’s resilient in light of these failures,” explains Meshenberg.

In its early days, Chaos Monkey’s tantrums in the cloud were a dispiriting experience. “It was painful,” Meshenberg admits. “We didn’t have the best practices, and so many of our systems failed in production. But now, since our engineers have this built-in expectation that our systems will have to be tested by Chaos Monkey, in production they’re now writing their software using the best practices that can withstand such destructive testing.”

Even without Chaos Monkey, there were still early setbacks, including a significant outage across North America on Christmas Eve 2012 thanks to an AWS update to elastic load balancers that tipped Netflix offline—a chastening event. But the company adapted, and came through it. By 2015 all of Netflix’s systems—bar its customer and employee data management databases, and billing and payment components—had been migrated to AWS. It would take a little longer before Meshenberg’s team could celebrate a job complete, but the relatively bump-free path (and the easy scaling up of systems as Netflix’s customer base skyrocketed) vindicated the move.

“The crux of our decision to go into the cloud,” says Meshenberg, was a simple one: “It wasn’t core to our business to build and operate data centers. It’s not something our users get value from. Our users get value from enjoying their entertainment. We decided to focus on that and push the underlying infrastructure to a cloud provider like AWS.”

For Netflix, dipping their toe into the water of cloud computing wasn’t an option. They had to dive in headfirst.

That said, making the leap was a brave move—not least given that, particularly when Netflix began its migration in 2009 and even when Meshenberg joined the company in 2011, cloud storage was still a relatively unknown technology in the Valley, and an unknown term to the general public. (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)  held  just its fourth ever international conference on cloud computing in Washington DC in 2011; technology analysts Gartner were still able, back in 2011, to  publish  a $2,000 “Hype Cycle” report explaining a technology that was on the rise.) Though those in the know understood the benefits of migrating to the cloud, and had a hunch that the general consensus would follow them, early adopters were still just that—pioneers pushing out the boundaries for the technology.

Going all-in on the cloud required betting on the future—and hoping that others would follow. But for Netflix, dipping their toe into the water of cloud computing wasn’t an option. They had to dive in headfirst.

“We had little doubt that cloud was the future,” explains Meshenberg. “If it was, it didn’t make sense to hedge our bets and straddle both worlds, because that would mean we would lose the focus of getting something done completely to the end.”

There was another factor in the decision for Netflix, too: scalability. “Our business was growing a lot faster than we would be able to build the capacity ourselves,” Meshenberg recalls. “Every time you grow your business your traffic grows by an order of magnitude, you have to rewrite the rules. The thing that worked for you at a smaller scale may no longer work at the bigger scale. We made a bet that the cloud would be a sufficient means in terms of capacity and capability to support our business, and the rest was figuring out the technical details of how.”

For Raj Patel, considering anything but the cloud was never really an option. Head of Cloud Engineering at Pinterest from 2014–2016, Patel joined a company that still had to engineer another move: from Amazon Web Service’s legacy cloud to a next-generation cloud system. “It wasn’t any different, frankly, than moving from a data center to the public cloud,” explains Patel. “We did a migration inside of Amazon.”

The move was one that some at the startup were wary of, even despite its benefits. “A cloud migration, in many cases, doesn’t necessarily get them anything,” says Patel. “The appeal has to be why they should do this before the five other things they were thinking about doing for their own group.”

At a small, nimble startup like Pinterest, time and resources are scarce, and an engineering team’s to-do list is as long as the sum of their collective arms. Getting people on-side with the cloud migration required deftness, discussion—and categorically not a top-down edict. It also required going person-to-person, winning small victories in support of the larger battle.

“You have to intuitively appeal or influence the motivations of an individual engineer to achieve your goal,” says Patel. “What I found was that at the earlier stages of the program I explicitly looked for folks that are early adopters or have a vested interest in doing that program or project, and you really focus on making them really successful. Then if the others see it they’ll get on board.”

Certain groups at Pinterest had pent-up frustrations with the older generation of Amazon’s cloud service, particularly when it same to the elasticity of potential future expansion. Data engineering-intensive applications ran up against walls with the old cloud server. Patel saw an in.

“We focused on those who would benefit the most,” he says, selling them on the idea of migrating over to a new cloud server, better equipped to deal with the developments they wanted to introduce. Patel’s team provided those early adopters with the tools to help them smoothly migrate over to the new cloud. That included embedding a consultant or solution engineer (rebranded “site reliability engineers” so as not to ruffle any feathers within the groups they joined) with each application team, who was able to provide the relevant tools and know-how to help ease the transition over to AWS. What the site reliability engineers from Patel’s team didn’t do, though, was impose any ideas or tools on the teams they joined.

"We focused on those who would benefit the most,” selling them on the idea of migrating over to a new cloud server, better equipped to deal with the developments they wanted to introduce.

“Any time you do a cloud migration—especially with engineers—there’s always this notion of: ‘Here’s my way of doing it, here’s your way of doing it: What’s the right way of doing it?’,” explains Patel. “If you had an outside group tell you this is the only way you’re going to do it, you’re going to run into a lot of friction.”

Rather, the teams worked collaboratively, engendering a sense of common purpose. Pinterest was, in truth, always going to make the move, and the company could have become forceful with its ideas, but Patel wanted a more consensual approach. “Their success is embedded with that application team,” says Patel. “Even though they might be talking about a central tool or approach, they’re perceived from the perspective of that application team.”

Like a pyramid scheme, the early adopters found success, and became proselytisers for the move. “When they talk to others at lunch, they say the migration is going really well; the guys doing it are really helpful, and it’s going just fantastic,” says Patel. “The next time you talk to the sceptics, they say: ‘Let’s go and do it.’”

At the same time, those systems that had successfully made the cloud-to-cloud migration were crowed about internally. Data democracy was crucial, says Patel, in getting across the message that the migration was something to be welcomed, not shunned. “We had important metrics about the progress we were making and would send it out to the whole engineering team to let them see it,” he explains. “People like data—engineers especially. They resonate with that progress.”

Six months later, Pinterest had transferred its backend to the more modern cloud system. The team held a party to celebrate the successful move, but truthfully, it was just another success for a company that has plenty of them.

“Think about it,” says Patel. “This was a company that was doubling or tripling in size every year. When I joined the company it was making $0 in revenue and the first year it was $100 million or something, then the next year something like three times that amount. That was the norm across the entire company. In some ways, it was just business as usual.”

When Patel moved to Symantec in April 2016 to become vice president for cloud platform engineering, things were far from business as usual.

“The magnitude of challenges are, I’d say, 5× with Symantec,” he explains. “That’s one of the things I’ve come to realize: While it’s interesting to talk about companies like Pinterest, Facebook or Instagram, their problem is already solved. They have some of the brightest engineers in the world, their applications are already designed for these cloud-type elastic architectures. In some ways, the challenge is not that interesting. But when you’re dealing with a 30-plus year-old company like Symantec, the challenge is a lot more interesting.”

For decades, Symantec had provided stability and assurance to customers—important, given its role as a security service. Unlike Pinterest, which was born in the cloud seven years ago, Symantec was founded in 1982, when computers were massive, hulking bits of hardware, hardwired to the wall. The company had been in business before the world wide web appeared as long as Pinterest has been in business, period. A publicly listed company—accountable to shareholders, with $3.6 billion of turnover—comes with more levels of hierarchy than a nimble, community-focused startup born in the Valley.

“There are more business units with general managers, instead of application teams,” explains Patel. “All those barriers are a lot more rigid in a larger enterprise than they are in the more nimble, engineering organisation approach you find in a startup.” There are also people who have been working in the company longer than some of Pinterest’s brightest young engineers—individuals who have decades of experience, and rightly should be listened to when they pass comment on the merits of such a move into the cloud. “Frankly, there were a lot of sceptics, and real architectural challenges in applications that simply have not been designed for the cloud,” says Patel. His work would end up closing down 27 separate data centers around the world and moving everything into the public cloud. The scale seemed almost insurmountable.

Even the business case for convincing staff at Symantec was more difficult; it simply wasn’t as easy an argument to make, because if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

“Your influencing job is probably 5× harder,” says Patel. “Because of the cultural transformation, you have to be a lot more convincing. You’re telling people to work differently which is very difficult, and sometimes the organization has the appetite to do those things, and sometimes they don’t.”

Much like Ruslan Meshenberg felt the need to win over his staff members, and just as Patel had to leverage the enthusiasm of early adopters at Pinterest to convince those who were less keen on taking the leap into the cloud, at Symantec Patel had to undergo a similar “hearts and minds” campaign.

Guided by Patel’s boss, the executive vice president of the sector, his team decided to show, not tell, fellow Symantec staffers about the benefits of cloud migration. “We took all the major classes of application and did a proof of concept for each one of them,” he explains. Patel’s team broke down the challenge, piece by piece, drawing up a technical feasibility study for each application, working with each group’s architect, building a proof of concept that could convince them such a move would work— “as opposed to saying: ‘We’re just going to run off this cliff and it’s going to work.’”

The attitude was a simple one: “Let’s remove the risk, and show that.”

It worked. Conviction built around the move; the only thing left to discuss was how exactly to handle the migration.

Big legacy companies planning a move to the cloud are faced with one of two options: They can go down the lift-and-shift path, or the fix-and-shift route.

The lift-and-shift route is the (comparatively) easy option. You take your pre-existing application as it presently works in a private data center, and make the minimum possible changes before moving it into the cloud. “I understand there’s going to be benefits to moving to the cloud, and I’m probably not going to realise most of them, but we’ll fix it later,” says Patel of the lift-and-shift approach.

Fix-and-shift is harder, but potentially more beneficial. You’re not just going to do the bare minimum work to ensure your application—which worked fine in an offline data center—will work in the cloud. You’re buying into the concept of moving to the cloud, fixing your culture along the way, and making it more adaptable to the new norm.

“A lot of the time what you’ll find is that traditional IT organisations tend to do lift-and-shift,” says Patel. “They’re taking the same thing they had in their private data centres and, whether it’s a corporate mandate or whatever, they say: ‘Let’s just go and move it to the cloud.’ They’re looking for roughly the same technical or organisational approaches to operating in the cloud before the cloud,” he adds. “And in my view, that’s why a lot of those efforts fail.”

It was the same choice that Neil Hunt and his team had considered back in The Towering Inferno conference room. “We could take the existing app, forklift it, and shove it into AWS, then start to chip away at it,” he explained. “That was unappealing. It would be easy to do but we’d bring along a lot of bad architecture and a lot of bad habits.”

Netflix’s second choice was equally unappealing at first glance, simply because of the scale of the task. “We would run our existing infrastructure, and side by side run our AWS infrastructure, and migrate one piece at a time, from one system to another.” As the cloud migration occurred, Netflix totally transformed. Its application also changed from a hulking, single monolithic application to a clutch of small microservices, each of which can be developed independent of the others. It recast the way the company thought about everything, completely changing the shape and makeup of the firm.

Years after Netflix’s brave decision to undergo the wholesale application and infrastructure refactor, Symantec came to the same decision: They’re fixing, then they’re shifting. Patel still has a way to go before he can breathe easily: The process has taken—and will take—time, but he’s hopeful about reaching the finish line that lingers temptingly on the horizon.

“I’ll personally feel a lot more excitement when we’re done here at Symantec, just because we’ll have done so much more organisationally,” he explains.

Patel already knows the jubilation that’s felt when you move an entire company into the cloud, and can’t wait to feel that again. For Ruslan Meshenberg, who had helped guide Netflix into the cloud without any major hitches, there was only one way to celebrate the achievement. It’s what Silicon Valley does best: Hold an amazing party.

“We had some fun, and we shared some battle stories,” says Meshenberg. The team shared a sense of achievement—personally and as a group. “Cloud migration involves every single person in a company, whether they’re engineering or not,” he adds.

Meshenberg, who had only known cloud migration in his time with the company, could move on from the project he was handed on the first day of his job, to task number two. It must’ve seemed easy-going in comparison, you’d think. “Relatively speaking,” he agrees — “but probably not less challenging. The only constant is change itself. Nothing stands still. We have to constantly re-evaluate our assumptions and ensure that our ecosystem evolves as well.”

“Cloud migration involves every single person in a company, whether they’re engineering or not.”

But Meshenberg still holds with him that sense of pride that his team and colleagues pulled off a major cloud migration without much of a hitch—and that they confounded the critics along the way, remaining ahead of the technical curve.

“When we went into the cloud we faced a lot of external scepticism, people saying this will never work, or that it may work but not for us,” he says. “It might not be secure enough, scalable enough—you name it.”

There’s a brief pause, a moment as Meshenberg collects his thoughts. Eventually, he comes out with 10 short words: “It was good to be able to get it done.”

About the author

Chris Stokel-Walker is a UK-based features journalist for The Economist , Bloomberg , the BBC, and Wired UK . His first book, YouTubers , was published in 2019, and his second, TikTok Boom, was published in July 2021.

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Zero trust strategy: Cloud security by design

The benefits of a security-first approach to cloud.

5-MINUTE READ

Call for change

As we have seen in the last 18 months, cloud opens the door to organizational agility on an unprecedented scale. But security is essential to take advantage of cloud’s potential. Accenture, with our size, scale and complexity, has experienced first-hand the power of cloud security.

Six years ago, Accenture initiated the move into the cloud. While our recent research has identified that security and compliance risk is seen as one of top two pain points of cloud adoption, we were clear from the outset that cloud security would be a critical component to supporting our business needs.

Moving from on-premise infrastructure where we had complete control, to collaborating in the cloud with vendors and needing to rely on their technology and environment was a big shift. Infrastructure and new service capabilities in the cloud are different; we couldn’t simply translate what we had on-premise directly into the cloud.

We needed to reimagine the approach to implementing our security model to harness the capabilities of cloud native solutions. We evolved core security guiding principles to meet the requirements of operating in the cloud. We redefined our security rules to flex around the updated cloud-based infrastructure. When we look at our security approach we think beyond just infrastructure to an application, data and code level as well.

Today, Accenture IT infrastructure runs in the hybrid cloud and is costing significantly less than our legacy delivery models. Our strategy was to be secure from the start, reframing our security in terms of cloud capabilities, which has helped us to see how our cloud solutions can support every element of security needed within the business.

When tech meets human ingenuity

Early on in our cloud continuum journey, we recognized the need to evolve our security practices to accommodate our core security values for the cloud. We wanted to be powered by software-defined, securing our application and infrastructure code from the start. We infused analytics that were behavior-driven, using automated artificial intelligence (AI) behavioral analytics to identify anomalies faster and with more accuracy when working across our cloud platforms. It was important to us to be cloud agnostic, fit for a multi-cloud environment, so that the security framework and principles apply to any cloud vendor with auditability.

What’s more we embedded robust defense, relying on multiple layers of security at varying depths: cloud, network, access, data and endpoints. We centered our strategy on a zero-trust approach, protecting every aspect of the cloud security journey by treating everything as untrusted. With the focus on zero trust, we followed an identity-centric approach, basing all access on identity where every request is explicitly verified.

Five core functions contributed to a successful cloud security journey:

We shared responsibilities . As we increased our software as-a-service (SaaS) and platform as-a-service (PaaS) consumption in the cloud, we focused on and trusted in a shared responsibility model with our cloud vendors. By sharing the responsibility with our hyperscalers instead of owning the responsibility, we become inherently more secure. Our partnerships with Microsoft, Amazon and Google cloud services took advantage of their maturity in the market, their wide security certifications, and the fact that they value security as much as we do.

We sought out cloud-based solutions . Cloud providers are investing heavily in their innovation offerings and security. By using cloud native and cloud-based policies, controls, processes and technologies we were able to tap into an inherent agility and scale when it came to supporting our own cloud security.

We enabled compliance . Partnering with our providers, our cloud security strategy anchors to industry-recognized standards and continuously adapts to enterprise business needs. We adhere to industry defined policies, using alerts, following the zero-trust principle and managing security through code to maintain compliance. This ensures our services, users, workloads and data are secure on day zero and stay protected from the ever-changing threat landscape as well as auditable for third-party validation.

We increased visibility . We took a multi-layered approach, enhancing security through cloud vendors’ technology and advanced threat detection solutions. We gained visibility not only for our own actionable management, but also external auditability.

We baked in trust . We believe identity is the new firewall. Our identity-centric approach means we have adopted a zero-trust strategy in which we embed proper and continuous identity validation. Trust is now fundamentally going to be driven by identity and role.

A valuable difference

We have taken a comprehensive view across the various components of operating in the cloud to create a truly holistic cloud security strategy. As we implement this transformational approach to security across a multi-cloud infrastructure, we can continue to enforce highly effective security policies, resources and services. Here are some of our lessons learned around effective cloud security:

• Design in terms of the cloud: A Cloud Continuum journey requires a very different operating model to any on-premise solution. Reimagine your security principles in terms of the cloud, to unlock the power of security in the cloud and transform your business.
• Make the cultural shift: Bridge the cultural gap to cloud native services from the top down. Education and training can help to change mindsets so that people understand the benefits of cloud and why your security posture is important.
• Promote partnership: Any Cloud Continuum journey involves not only handing over a certain amount of control to third parties, but also inheriting the sophistication of the cloud solutions. It’s important to build trusted relationships with your providers and to look at the ownership of security as shared.

Going forward, to secure and manage access controls across a multi-cloud environment, we have our sights set on cross-platform alignment so that all identities align across all platforms and vendors. Using data as the key driver, our cloud security will continue to be comprehensive as our cloud capabilities grow across platforms. And we want to discover new solutions and augment our security with AI for threat detection and machine learning to remediate our code to prevent potential vulnerabilities. This combined with our Prevent, Protect, Detect, and Recover strategy can strengthen our zero-trust imperative.

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10 Cloud Computing Success Stories by Leveraging AWS and Azure

Written by Staff February 16, 2022

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Transitioning to new innovations in software development often feels like taking a leap of faith. Setting aside all pretense of encouraging articles, sharp marketing, and apparent functionality, you may still be left scratching your head over whether or not this next step is the right one to make.

Cloud computing has been an innovation that has turned over new stones for businesses around the globe. In theory, it’s a fascinating prospect, but what is theory without results? We’re saying you shouldn’t just take our word for it.

Rather than blind acceptance, we’re providing ten examples of businesses that have thrived using cloud computing through the services provided by AWS and Azure. Whether you find these success stories to be reassurance or simply interesting, they’re proof enough that cloud computing service models aren’t just hot air.

Cloud Success Stories with Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services, or AWS for short, is a cloud platform provided by Amazon, hosting infrastructure for anything from start-ups to enterprise businesses to government agencies. They provide the latest innovations in technology, like machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and an enormous suite of other services to help advance any and all businesses.

But what about the cloud success stories? What established companies have exploited AWS to give themselves a major edge in the business world?

1. SimScale

SimScale   is a computer-aided engineering software product that provides simulation tools to over 100,00 users. They allow these thousands of users to run more simulations than traditional local computer-based systems, and in turn they iterate more design changes as a result.

The start-up was founded as a solution to the high costs of using simulation as part of the design process, giving product designers the opportunity to simulate in an affordable way and make better informed decisions.

SimScale was built by 5 co-founders who were still students at the time, and as it tends to be with students, they had a very limited budget to work with. They decided to launch the platform in the cloud through Amazon Web Services. Deciding to run the business in the AWS Cloud from day one allowed SimScale to be the first simulation product to market, enjoying considerable growth ever since.

SimScale co-founders recognize that they’ve been able to set up a simulation environment in an extremely cost-efficient way. Had they used their own hardware, they would have required a complete team of people to run their system. Instead, they now only employ a few DevOps engineers to look after the AWS Cloud infrastructure.

Using AWS has saved them thousands in hardware, personnel costs, and IT maintenance. The result is now hundreds of thousands of users running simulations efficiently to improve the design of their products.

Airbnb   is an online marketplace and hospitality service company that allows property owners and travelers to connect with the purpose of renting unique vacation spaces around the world. Based in San Francisco, California, Airbnb doesn’t own any of the properties listed on their services. It simply acts as a broker, receiving commissions from each booking.

The idea for the company was conceived after its founders placed a mattress in their apartment living room and renting said space as a bed-and-breakfast. A year after Airbnb was launched, the company decided to migrate nearly all of its cloud computing functions to AWS due to service issues with their original provider.

AWS gave them the possibility to ramp up more servers without having to contact or go through anybody and without committing to a certain minimum usage. The provided leniency accelerated Airbnb’s growth exponentially without any setbacks. Not only that, but the entire database migration to Amazon RDS was completed with only requiring 15 minutes of platform downtime.

3. Nextdoor

Nextdoor   is a private social networking service for neighborhoods based in San Francisco. It allows its members to connect and communicate about relevant issues in their communities, such as news, events, local service-provider recommendations, warnings about suspicious activity, and so on so forth.

Nextdoor currently uses AWS to develop and launch new features and products on demand with just a single click, immediately improving user performance without the need of any engineering work. For Nextdoor, their IT priority is to have a fast and solid platform that can support their users effectively and efficiently, since the occasions may rise that they need to message their neighbors urgently in times of crisis. Therefore, they need flexibility to scale up and meet their growing customers demands.

4. Flatiron Health

Flatiron Health   is a healthcare technology and services company that focuses on accelerating cancer research and improving patient care. This is facilitated by hosting a platform that allows cancer researchers and care providers to share relevant information and learn from the specific experience of every patient.

Flatiron was founded after its creators experienced the painful journey of cancer through close family and friends. Through these experiences, they realized there was no easy way to access useful data of previous cancer patients in the U.S. Flatiron was conceived as a solution to ensure that researchers and doctors were able to collaborate by connecting cancer centers across the United States, allowing them to share what they have learned from every patient’s experience with the disease.

The benefits the company enjoys through AWS include the improvement of cancer data quality across the U.S. and speedy development of oncology-data software. Flatiron collaborates with over 260 oncology practices, large academic research institutions, and other healthcare organizations, which currently use the company’s cloud-based system to manage their daily workflows and analyze more than 1.6 million cancer patients.

All of this happens while also ensuring HIPAA compliance and other healthcare-industry regulations by running on the AWS Cloud. Leveraging the cloud gives Flatiron professionals the time they need to concentrate on developing better software for oncology practices, provide organized cancer data to researchers quicker, and ultimately accelerate the fight against cancer.

5. Worldline

Worldline formerly Bambora, is a Swedish company that provides card acquiring, payment processing, infrastructure, and additional services to businesses of all sizes, enabling offline and online sellers to accept debit and credit card payments.

Founded in 2015, Worldline now has over 700 employees and operates in more than 65 countries. Because of this rapid growth, Worldline needed a heavily secured IT system that could scale quickly on a global level and efficiently meet legislations on all the countries it operates in.

By utilizing AWS to host many of its platforms, the company is able to enter new markets in an average of three months, which is far quicker than the industry average. This is precisely because they don’t need hardware to function. Some other benefits of implementing cloud solutions include:

• Scaling easily to match the business’ multimillion dollar growth in just two years
• Launching new features to market in three months instead of twelve, which is the current industry average
• Quickly setting up compliant environments in any country

Cloud Success Stories with Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is not altogether different from AWS, providing cloud computing infrastructure for a variety of business sizes. Designed for compatibility with any industry, it distinguishes itself from its competition by being the only hybrid cloud service on the market. It’s committed to open source software, enabling businesses to effectively develop from anywhere by any means.

1. DriveTime

DriveTime   is a used car retailer and finance company based in Tempe, Arizona. The retailing process is as follows: DriveTime buys used cars at different auctions, then puts the purchased cars through a 14-day inspection at one of its 24 inspection centers to make any necessary repairs before sending the vehicles to its dealerships.

In order to deliver the best possible value to customers, the company used to send its 65 buyers yearly to physically inspect and acquire thousands of cars at public auctions all across the country. Said buyers relied on their knowledge from years of experience, keeping track of the whole process on paper. After years of doing things the old way, DriveTime decided to automate their manual, intuition-based auction and purchasing process by building an app through Microsoft Azure cloud database services.

With the Online Buyer app, the buyers now connect from their computers to a live-video feed and review every car, in up to four auctions at once, instead of traveling to just one auction and walking lanes of cars. This allows DirveTime to acquire 3x more vehicles than they could before with the obsolete manual process. The company inspectors can now save time and actually transform their knowledge into an accurate and repeatable purchase process.

2. Wineshipping

Wineshipping   is a wine shipment company founded in Napa, California, over 30 years ago. Wineshipping currently manages nine facilities across the U.S. with more than 700 wineries available as providers. Wine bottle shipping must be done with extreme care that includes temperature control, special packaging, and breakage insurance.

In order to operate efficiently, Wineshipping must track its customer and operational data tightly. With this in mind, they decided to go for a cloud-based solution with Dynamics 365 to focus more time on running the business and less on managing IT infrastructure and staff.

Through its Dynamics 365 deployment, the company unified its four financial systems into a single platform, helping it meet financial obligations on time, like submitting tax reports to state liquor control boards and federal agencies, while reducing operating costs by 20% and increasing productivity by 30 to 50%.

3. Accenture United States

Accenture United States   is a professional services company specializing in strategy, consulting, digital transformation, IT, and operations. 90% of the company’s applications and servers have migrated to the cloud, including Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, giving employees access to business data no matter where they are, boosting productivity.

To increase security on their cloud apps, Accenture deployed Microsoft Cloud App Security, which provides them with identity and access management tools, mobile device and app management, data protection and security, as well as threat detection and prevention.

Devon   is an oil and natural gas exploration and production company based in the U.S. Devon is a data-driven company and must provide said data to the right people in an efficient way. By utilizing Office 365, Devon gives its field workers the ability to access that data immediately from any device, to make a drilling decision, approve purchase orders, or request delivery of materials to a work site, just to name a few examples.

Besides these other benefits provided by Microsoft, the company migrated its line-of-business applications and disaster recovery operations to the cloud with Microsoft Azure. This move allowed the company to rapidly deploy applications and scale accordingly in a cost-efficient manner.

5. San Diego County Office of Emergency Services

The   San Diego County Office of Emergency Services   coordinates the county’s response to disasters, and is the designated organization that San Diego residents turn to when they need up-to-date information during said disasters, such as floods, wildfires, earthquakes, and so on. The OES is also responsible for notifying and coordinating all agencies when a disaster strikes, ensuring all needed resources are available and mobilized efficiently, and developing recovery procedures.

To efficiently serve the whole community, the OES developed a cloud-based portal, having the ability to send notifications to San Diego residents on their mobile devices, with information also being available in Spanish and formats for blind or deaf citizens.

During disasters prior to deployment to a cloud-based platform, the county’s on-premises servers could not handle the huge flood of visitors to their official website, resulting in the site crashing. That experience led them to look for a better web hosting solution, which made them turn to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, reducing their costs by 78%.

With these improvements and updates in place, the OES agency is now meeting its goal of efficiently serving more county residents during times of crisis by providing real information in real time with push notifications, allowing them to make the right decisions that will help ensure their safety.

The Leap of Faith

Older web hosting services are becoming noticeably obsolete as cloud computing service models gain popularity. The cloud success stories we listed are only a few of thousands of thriving businesses that have made the transition. The earlier your organization makes the shift, the more efficient you’ll find the future to be.

The transition, however, isn’t guaranteed to be easy. That’s why we at Improving Nearshore are more than happy to provide you with the help you need to get there. Our   Cloud Innovation Center   prides itself on its competencies for rendering the assistance needed to make the full transition to AWS or Azure, manage or leverage your existing cloud resources, assess your network infrastructure, and more.

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AWS Case Studies: Services and Benefits in 2024

Home Blog Cloud Computing AWS Case Studies: Services and Benefits in 2024

With its extensive range of cloud services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has completely changed the way businesses run. Organisations demonstrate how AWS has revolutionized their operations by enabling scalability, cost-efficiency, and innovation through many case studies. AWS's computing power, storage, database management, and artificial intelligence technologies have benefited businesses of all sizes, from startups to multinational corporations. These include improved security, agility, worldwide reach, and lower infrastructure costs. With Amazon AWS educate program it helps businesses in various industries to increase growth, enhance workflow, and maintain their competitiveness in today's ever-changing digital landscape. So, let's discuss the AWS cloud migration case study   and its importance in getting a better understanding of the topic in detail.

What are AWS Case Studies, and Why are They Important?

The   AWS case   studies comprehensively explain how companies or organizations have used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to solve problems, boost productivity, and accomplish objectives. These studies provide real-life scenarios of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in operation, showcasing the wide range of sectors and use cases in which AWS can be successfully implemented. They offer vital lessons and inspiration for anyone considering or already using AWS by providing insights into the tactics, solutions, and best practices businesses use the AWS Cloud Engineer program . The Amazon ec2 case study   is crucial since it provides S's capabilities, assisting prospective clients in comprehending the valuable advantages and showcasing AWS's dependability, scalability, and affordability in fostering corporate innovation and expansion.

What are the Services Provided by AWS, and What are its Use Cases?

The   case study on AWS in Cloud Computing provided and its use cases mentioned:

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Use Cases

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) enables you to quickly spin up virtual computers with no initial expenditure and no need for a significant hardware investment. Use the AWS admin console or automation scripts to provision new servers for testing and production environments promptly and shut them down when not in use.

AWS EC2 use cases consist of:

• With options for load balancing and auto-scaling, create a fault-tolerant architecture.
• Select EC2 accelerated computing instances if you require a lot of processing power and GPU capability for deep learning and machine learning.

Relational Database Service (RDS) Use Cases

Since Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a managed database service, it alleviates the stress associated with maintaining, administering, and other database-related responsibilities.

AWS RDS uses common cases, including:

• Without additional overhead or staff expenditures, a new database server can be deployed in minutes and significantly elevate dependability and uptime. It is the perfect fit for complex daily database requirements that are OLTP/transactional.
• RDS should be utilized with NoSQL databases like Amazon OpenSearch Service (for text and unstructured data) and DynamoDB (for low-latency/high-traffic use cases).

AWS Workspaces

AWS offers Amazon Workspaces, a fully managed, persistent desktop virtualization service, to help remote workers and give businesses access to virtual desktops within the cloud. With it, users can access the data, apps, and resources they require from any supported device, anywhere, at any time.

AWS workspaces use cases

• IT can set up and manage access fast. With the web filter, you can allow outgoing traffic from a Workspace to reach your chosen internal sites.
• Some companies can work without physical offices and rely solely on SaaS apps. Thus, there is no on-premises infrastructure. They use cloud-based desktops via AWS Workspaces and other services in these situations.

AWS Case Studies

Now, we'll be discussing different case studies of AWS, which are mentioned below: -

Case Study - 1: Modern Web Application Platform with AWS

American Public Media, the programming section of Minnesota Public Radio, is one of the world's biggest producers and distributors of public television. To host their podcast, streaming music, and news websites on AWS, they worked to develop a proof of concept.

After reviewing an outdated active-passive disaster recovery plan, MPR decided to upgrade to a cloud infrastructure to modernize its apps and methodology. This infrastructure would need to be adaptable to changes within the technology powering their apps, scalable to accommodate their audience growth, and resilient to support their disaster recovery strategy.

MPR and AWS determined that MPR News and the public podcast websites should be hosted on the new infrastructure to show off AWS as a feasible choice. Furthermore, AWS must host multiple administrative apps to demonstrate its private cloud capabilities. These applications would be an image manager, a schedule editor, and a configuration manager.

To do this, AWS helped MPR set up an EKS Kubernetes cluster . The apps would be able to grow automatically according to workload and traffic due to the cluster. AWS and MPR developed Elasticsearch at Elastic.co and a MySQL instance in RDS to hold application data.

Business Benefits

Considerable cost savings were made possible by the upgraded infrastructure. Fewer servers would need to be acquired for these vital applications due to the decrease in hardware requirements. Additionally, switching to AWS made switching from Akamai CDN to CloudFront simple. This action reduced MPR's yearly expenses by thousands.

Case Study - 2: Platform Modernisation to Deploy to AWS

Foodsby was able to proceed with its expansion goals after receiving a $6 million investment in 2017, but it still needed to modernize its mobile and web applications. For a faster time to launch to AWS, they improved and enhanced their web, iOS, and Android applications.

Sunsetting technology put this project on a surged timeline. Selecting the mobile application platform required serious analysis and expert advice to establish consensus across internal stakeholders.

Improving the creation of front-end and back-end web apps that separated them into microservices to enable AWS hosting, maximizing scalability. Strengthening recommended full Native for iOS and Android and quickly creating and implementing that solution.

Case Study - 3: Cloud Platform with Kubernetes

SPS Commerce hired AWS to assist them with developing a more secure cloud platform, expanding their cloud deployment choices through Kubernetes, and educating their engineers on these advanced technologies.

SPS serves over 90,000 retail, distribution, grocery, and e-commerce businesses. However, to maintain its growth, SPS needs to remove obstacles to deploying new applications on AWS and other cloud providers in the future. They wanted a partner to teach their internal development team DevOps principles and reveal them to Kubernetes best practices, even though they knew Kubernetes would help them achieve this.

To speed up new project cycle times, decrease ramp-up times, and improve the team's Kubernetes proficiency, it assisted with developing a multi-team, Kubernetes-based platform with a uniform development method. The standards for development and deployment and assisted them in establishing the deployment pipeline.

Most teams can plug, play, and get code up and running quickly due to the streamlined deployment interface. SPS Commerce benefits from Kubernetes' flexibility and can avoid vendor lock-in, which they require to switch cloud providers.

Case Study - 4: Using Unified Payment Solutions to Simplify Government Services

The customer, who had a portfolio of firms within its authority, needed to improve experience to overcome the difficulty of combining many payment methods into a single, unified solution.

Due to the customers' varied acquisitions, the payment system landscape became fragmented, making it more difficult for clients to make payments throughout a range of platforms as well as technologies. Providing a streamlined payment experience could have been improved by this lack of coherence and standardization.

It started developing a single, cloud-based payment system that complies with the customers' microservices-based reference design. CRUD services were created after the user interface for client administration was set at the beginning of the project.

With this, the customer can streamline operations and increase efficiency by providing a smooth payment experience.

The new system demonstrated a tremendous improvement over the old capability, demonstrating the ability to handle thousands of transactions per second.

Maintaining system consistency and facilitating scalability and maintenance were made more accessible by aligning with the reference architecture.

Case Study - 5: Accelerated Data Migration to AWS

They selected improvements to create   an   AWS cloud migration case study cloud platform to safely transfer their data from a managed service provider to AWS during the early phases of a worldwide pandemic.

Early in 2020, COVID-19 was discovered, and telemedicine services were used to lessen the strain on hospital infrastructure. The number of telehealth web queries increased dramatically overnight, from 5,000 to 40,000 per minute. Through improvement, Zipnosis was able to change direction and reduce the duration of its AWS migration plan from six to three months. The AWS architecture case study includes HIPAA, SOC2, and HITRUST certification requirements. They also wanted to move their historic database smoothly across several web-facing applications while adhering to service level agreements (SLAs), which limited downtime.

Using Terraform and Elastic Kubernetes Service, the AWS platform creates a modern, infrastructure-as-code, HIPAA-compliant, and HITRUST-certified environment. With the help of serverless components, tools were developed to roll out an Application Envelope, enabling the creation of a HIPAA-compliant environment that could be activated quickly.

Currently, Zipnosis has internal platform management. Now that there is more flexibility, scaling up and down is more affordable and accessible. Their services are more marketable to potential clients because of their scalable, secure, and efficient infrastructure. Their use of modern technologies, such as Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, simplifies hiring top people. Zipnosis is in an excellent position to move forward.

Case Study - 6: Transforming Healthcare Staffing

The customer's outdated application presented difficulties. It was based on the outdated DBROCKET platform and needed an intuitive user interface, testing tools, and extensibility. Modernizing the application was improving the job and giving the customer an improved, scalable, and maintainable solution.

Although the customer's old application was crucial for predicting hospital staffing needs, maintenance, and improvements were challenging due to its reliance on the obscure DBROCKET platform. Hospitals lost money on inefficient staff scheduling due to the application's lack of responsiveness and a mobile-friendly interface.

Choosing Spring Boot and Groovy for back-end development to offer better maintainability and extensibility throughout the improved migration of the application from DBROCKET to a new technology stack. Unit tests were used to increase the reliability and standard of the code.

Efficiency at Catalis increased dramatically when the advanced document redaction technology was put in place. They were able to process papers at a significantly higher rate because the automated procedure cut down the time and effort needed for manual redaction.

Catalis cut infrastructure costs by utilizing serverless architecture and cloud-based services. They saved a significant amount of money because they were no longer required to upgrade and maintain on-premises servers.

The top-notch Knowledgehut best Cloud Computing courses that meet different demands and skill levels are available at KnowledgeHut. Through comprehensive curriculum, hands-on exercises, and expert-led instruction, attendees may learn about and gain practical experience with cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more. Professionals who complete these courses will be efficient to succeed in the quickly developing sector of cloud computing.

Finally,   a   case study of   AWS retail case studies offers a range of features and advantages. These studies show how firms in various industries use AWS for innovation and growth, from scalability to cost efficiency. AWS offers a robust infrastructure and a range of technologies to satisfy changing business needs, whether related to improving customer experiences with cloud-based solutions or streamlining processes using AI and machine learning. These case studies provide substantial proof of AWS's influence on digital transformation and the success of organizations.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

From the case study of Amazon web services, companies can learn how other businesses use AWS services to solve real-world problems, increase productivity, cut expenses, and innovate. For those looking to optimize their cloud strategy and operations, these case studies provide insightful information, optimal methodologies, and purpose. 

You can obtain case studies on AWS through the AWS website, which has a special section with a large selection of case studies from different industries. In addition, AWS releases updated case studies regularly via various marketing platforms and on its blog.

The case study of Amazon web services, which offers specific instances of how AWS services have been successfully applied in various settings, can significantly assist in the decision-making process for IT initiatives. Project planning and strategy can be informed by the insights, best practices, and possible solutions these case studies provide.

Kingson Jebaraj

Kingson Jebaraj is a highly respected technology professional, recognized as both a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and an Alibaba Most Valuable Professional. With a wealth of experience in cloud computing, Kingson has collaborated with renowned companies like Microsoft, Reliance Telco, Novartis, Pacific Controls UAE, Alibaba Cloud, and G42 UAE. He specializes in architecting innovative solutions using emerging technologies, including cloud and edge computing, digital transformation, IoT, and programming languages like C, C++, Python, and NLP. 

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How 6 Companies saved up to 80% Cloud Costs – Case Studies

• AWS , Cost Management , Google Cloud Platform
• By Adarsh Rai
• February 20, 2024

Table of Contents

The allure of cloud computing often promises scalability, flexibility, and enhanced performance. But for many companies, the transition to the cloud comes with an unwelcome surprise: escalating costs.

This usually happens due to misconfigured workloads, oversight of optimum pricing models, or simply a lack of understanding about the available discounts. These missteps can lead to an increase in operational expenditures, creating financial and logistical challenges.

Recognizing the importance of this issue, we’ve done the research for you. Our team has curated six insightful case studies that highlight companies making the most out of their AWS and GCP investments. These organizations have not only managed to cut down costs but also have successfully improved performance, turning the cloud from a cost burden to a strategic asset .

How to Save Cloud Costs and Increase Performance

Before diving into the specific companies, let’s shed light on the general strategies that lead to successful cloud cost management:

• Right-Sizing Instances : Don’t over-provision resources; it’s a cost sink and inefficient. Use tools like AWS Cost Explorer or GCP’s Cost Management to pinpoint underused resources.
• Spot and Preemptible Instances : Utilize AWS’s Spot Instances or GCP’s Preemptible VMs for non-critical, interruption-tolerant workloads. These can cut costs by up to 90%.
• Auto-Scaling : Use AWS Auto Scaling Groups or GCP’s Managed Instance Groups to automatically adjust resources based on demand, saving costs and improving application performance.
• Data Transfer Optimization : Large data transfers can be costly. Consider AWS Direct Connect or Google Cloud Interconnect to reduce data transfer expenses.
• Reserved and Committed Use Discounts : For predictable workloads, look into AWS Reserved Instances or GCP’s Committed Use Discounts , which offer long-term contract savings.
• Budget and Alert Tools : Utilize AWS Budgets or GCP Budgets to set custom spending alerts. This proactive approach helps you manage your costs effectively.

GCP Cost Reduction and Performance Increase

We’ll pull back the curtain on the precise techniques and tools these companies employed, offering valuable insights that you can apply to your own cloud strategies.

Arabesque AI – Financial Asset Management, Saved 75%

About the Company Arabesque AI is a key player in the financial asset management arena, specializing in leveraging artificial intelligence to create highly flexible and efficient investment strategies. A subsidiary of the Arabesque group, the company employs AI to sift through financial markets and identify patterns that can be universally applied to various asset classes.

• Key Workloads : Data ingestion from third-party pipelines, AI-driven analytics, and customizable investment portfolio creation.
• Core Tools Used : Google Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, GKE, and BigQuery.

Cost Optimizations and Resource Utilization Strategies The company faced the challenge of efficiently scaling up its compute resources to train new AI models, while also managing costs. They adopted Google Cloud’s preemptible node pools within GKE to dynamically scale resources, which proved to be cost-effective and easy to manage.

• Optimization Techniques : Use of preemptible instances in GKE, leveraging Cloud Run and Cloud Functions’ pay-as-you-go models.
• Performance Gains : 10x increase in data streaming and analysis capabilities.

Arabesque AI was able to focus more resources on core research activities, thanks to the reduced operational overhead provided by Google Cloud . With strategic use of preemptible instances and dynamic scaling, they cut their server costs by approximately 75%, all while increasing their data analysis capabilities tenfold.

Current – Financial Tools for Teens, Reduced Costs by 60%

About the Company Current is a fintech startup providing an innovative debit card and app tailored for teenagers. This one-stop solution assists teens in learning financial management by offering features such as savings goals, real-time balance checks, and chore-based earnings. Parents can also set automated allowances and monitor spending activities through real-time alerts.

• Key Workloads : Real-time financial tracking, user relationship management via Neo4j graph database, and GraphQL API for business operations.
• Core Tools Used : Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Container Registry, and Google Stackdriver.

Challenges and Cloud Optimization Strategies Initially built on a simpler infrastructure, Current faced scalability issues, particularly with their Neo4j graph database, as they grew to over 25,000 daily active users. The lack of an effective logging system further compounded these issues. By moving to Google Cloud and embracing containerization, they eliminated these bottlenecks and improved their service availability.

• Optimization Techniques : Hosting applications in Docker containers, automated cluster management with Google Kubernetes Engine.
• Performance Gains : 400% improvement in app development time-to-market, 80% reduction in error resolution time.

Current saw immediate benefits post-migration. They slashed their cloud hosting costs by 60% and improved app deployment times from days to mere hours. The ability to quickly identify and resolve issues led to an 80% reduction in error resolution time, freeing up resources for feature developments

Apxor – Zero-Code App Development, Saved 30%

About the Company Apxor is a tech startup that enables mobile app companies to grow and retain their user base by enhancing in-app experiences through data-backed solutions. The startup notably ranks within the Top 100 Software Products in the 2019 G2 Crowd Awards. The company prides itself as a zero-code solution provider, meaning customers can implement its features without writing a single line of code.

Apxor’s data points collection regions

• Key Workloads : Real-time user feedback analysis, personalized user experience crafting, and data processing.
• Core Tools Used : Google Compute Engine, Google Dataflow, and TensorFlow.

Challenges and Cloud Optimization Strategies Before moving to Google Cloud, Apxor faced difficulties with their previous cloud provider, particularly regarding infrastructure deployments and bandwidth. After running several proofs of concept, Apxor switched to Google Cloud . This decision has led to optimized operations, cost savings, and scalability.

• Optimization Techniques : Database hosting on Compute Engine, data processing with Dataflow, and machine learning applications through TensorFlow.
• Performance Gains : 30% cost savings in infrastructure, freeing up DevOps time for new product roadmaps, and processing 1.5 billion data points daily.

Since making the transition, Apxor has observed several significant benefits. The startup cut infrastructure costs by 30% and liberated their DevOps team from time-consuming infrastructure management tasks. This newfound time has allowed the team to focus more on developing new product roadmaps and service offerings.

AWS Cost Efficiency and Performance Enhancement

As we delve into a new set of real-world stories, we shift our focus to companies that have leveraged Amazon Web Services (AWS) to transform their cloud economics and operational performance.

Discovery – Leading Media Content Provider, Saved 61% on TCO

About the Company

Discovery, a giant in the media content landscape, is renowned for delivering over 8,000 hours of original programming each year and boasting category leadership across multiple genres worldwide. With an innovative distribution strategy, the company reaches its global audience through diverse channels like direct-to-consumer streaming services and high-profile global partnerships.

Discover’s cloud journey

Harnessing AWS’s Cloud Capabilities

To handle its complex media operations, Discovery places its trust in Amazon Web Services (AWS). The backbone of Discovery’s cloud-based playout infrastructure lies in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ( Amazon EC2 ) and Amazon Simple Storage System ( Amazon S3 ).

Approximately 1,000 Amazon EC2 instances are dedicated solely to playout, alongside additional instances allocated for rigorous testing and quality assurance. With this, Discovery manages to store a whopping 15 petabytes of broadcast content at any given time.

AWS Services Leveraged

• Amazon EC2 : For cloud-based playout infrastructure
• Amazon S3 : For reliable and scalable storage
• AWS Direct Connect : For secure and high-speed data transfer to on-premises facilities
• Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering : For cost-effective storage management

Cost Optimization Strategies

• Downsizing Server Footprint : Reduced on-premises server racks from 130 to just 10 in London
• Utilizing Reserved Instances : Leveraging Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances for significant savings
• Storage Tiering : Using Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering to automatically move less frequently accessed data to lower-cost storage tiers
• Volume Discounts : Bulk purchasing to avail lower prices

Expanding Business Agility

AWS’s cloud capabilities provided Discovery with enhanced operational resilience and agility. It enabled faster deployment of new features and applications and reduced the opportunity cost related to fixed asset management. A TCO analysis done in partnership with AWS Cloud Economics showed a 61% reduction in costs as compared to equivalent on-premises infrastructure.

Airbnb: Online Accommodation Marketplace, Saved 60%

Airbnb has been a game-changer in the travel industry since its inception in 2007. From welcoming just three guests in a San Francisco apartment to hosting over one billion travelers across 220 countries, the company has come a long way. Airbnb operates in a digital-first environment, making cloud services crucial for its growth.

Airbnb’s cloud infrastructure

Key Workloads

• Reservation and Booking Management
• Data Analytics and Business Intelligence
• Customer Experience Optimization
• Real-Time Payment Processing
• Content Management and Storage

Scaling at an unprecedented rate brought Airbnb face-to-face with complex cost optimization challenges. While AWS provided an agile platform to support Airbnb’s rapid expansion, it also posed dilemmas on managing resources effectively.

The fragmented data management strategy and increasing storage and compute costs needed to be tackled. Moreover, Airbnb lacked a centralized strategy for cost management, which was crucial for steering the company towards a leaner, more efficient mode of operation.

Tools, Services, and Strategies Used

To combat these challenges, Airbnb turned to a multi-faceted approach leveraging several AWS tools and services:

• AWS Cost & Usage Report: Used for granular data analytics related to costs.
• Amazon EC2 and Savings Plans: To secure cost-efficient, resizable compute capacity.
• Amazon S3 and S3 Intelligent-Tiering: For optimized, dynamic data storage solutions.
• Amazon EMR : Employs cloud-based big data platforms for advanced analytics.
• Amazon OpenSearch Service with UltraWarm Storage: For a more cost-efficient logging infrastructure.

Airbnb also developed strategic methods such as:

• Custom Data Pipeline : Customized analytics for actionable insights.
• Cost Allocation Visualization using AWS Cost Explorer : For an easier, more intuitive understanding of their spending.

Overall Benefits

Airbnb’s journey with AWS has been one of continual improvement, both operationally and financially. By embracing AWS services, Airbnb was able to slash storage costs by 27% and reduce Amazon OpenSearch Service costs by an impressive 60%.

But the benefits were not purely financial. Airbnb built a cost-efficiency culture, facilitated by custom data pipelines and dynamic views of cost data.

Razer- Gaming Lifestyle Brand, Saved up to 90%

Razer, a titan in the gaming lifestyle brand arena, has been relentlessly pushing the envelope since its inception in 2005. Committed to providing high-performance gaming experiences, the company needed an infrastructure that could dynamically adapt to fluctuating traffic volumes—especially during weekends and post-work hours when gamers are most active.

Razer Synapse : The 1st Cloud Based Storage for Personalized Gaming

Razer is a mammoth gaming brand, boasting over 175 million user accounts as of 2021. To serve its user base, the company required a robust yet flexible infrastructure that could not only handle high traffic volumes but also cater to users’ individualized gaming profiles.

Their unique challenge lay in the sporadic nature of the gaming industry’s daily cycle—requiring elasticity to efficiently scale resources up or down, particularly during peak gaming hours. Traditional reserved instances could lead to underutilized capacity, translating into unnecessary costs.

To surmount these challenges, Razer meticulously utilized a range of AWS services:

• Amazon EC2 Spot Instances : For capturing unused EC2 capacity at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand rates.
• Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances and Savings Plans : For handling predictable workloads at reduced costs.
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling : To dynamically adjust the number of instances based on real-time demand.
• AWS Graviton Processor : Deployed to achieve significant price-performance benefits across multiple workloads.

Razer strategically combined these services to optimize their operational efficiency:

• Customized Auto Scaling : Based on market prices, ensuring cost-efficiency during high-traffic scenarios.
• AWS Graviton Processor Migration : For delivering increased performance at a competitive price point.

By fully embracing AWS’ suite of tools and services, Razer slashed its Amazon EC2 costs by an astonishing 70–90% . The utilization of Spot Instances allowed Razer to achieve performance that met user demands, all while staying within budget. A seamless migration to AWS Graviton processors yielded an additional 5-10% cost savings, delivering an unparalleled price-performance ratio.

Managing cloud expenditures effectively is both an art and a science. As our diverse case studies demonstrate, remarkable cost savings are achievable with a customized blend of services and strategies.

Whether through Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, or Google Cloud’s Committed Use Discounts and Custom Machine Types, these companies tailored their approach to align perfectly with their unique workloads and business requirements, resulting in substantial discounts on their monthly cloud expenditures.

If your organization is grappling with skyrocketing cloud bills or struggling to pinpoint the exact causes behind escalating costs, it’s time to consider a specialized solution . Economize offers a comprehensive approach to cloud cost management.

Schedule a free demo with Economize today and discover how we can help your organization slash its cloud costs by up to 30%—all within just 5 minutes.

AWS Savings Plan vs Reserved Instances: An Overview

AWS VPC: 5 Essential Strategies to Optimize your VPC Network

Gemini for Google Cloud: 4 AI Features to Empower Business

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I decided to choose the Cloud Case for American Airlines.

• My thoughts on this case study is that it would be overall beneficial to American Airlines. This is the case because the airline business is very competitive, therefore airlines need to keep up with the latest technology to stay relevant to customers.
• The advantages for using cloud computing are that it is up to date technology and it transfers information in a quick and efficient manner. The disadvantages are that information does have a higher chance of being lost while transferring on the cloud. Also it could potentially be hacked depending on the system that is being used.
• If I were working for American Airlines, I would probably be for the cloud computing. This is the case because it would make things easier to transfer data. Having the cloud computing would give the company a leg up since they would be adapting new technology to the company.

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Realize the business value of generative AI in your organization

Top generative ai use cases, improve customer experiences.

Chatbots and virtual assistants Streamline customer self-service processes and reduce operational costs by automating responses for customer service queries through generative AI-powered chatbots, voice bots, and virtual assistants. Learn more

Conversational analytics Analyze unstructured customer feedback from surveys, website comments, and call transcripts to identify key topics, detect sentiment, and surface emerging trends. Learn more

Agent assist Enhance agent performance and improve first contact resolution through task automation, summarization, enhanced knowledge base searches, and tailored cross-sell/upsell product recommendations. Learn more

Personalization Deliver better personalized experiences and increase customer engagement with individually curated offerings and communications. Learn more

Boost employee productivity

Employee assistant Improve employee productivity by quickly and easily finding accurate information, get accurate answers, summarize and create and summarizing content through a conversational interface. Learn more

Code generation Accelerate application development with code suggestions based on the developer’s comments and code. Learn more

Automated report generation Generative AI can be used to automatically generate financial reports, summaries, and projections, saving time and reducing errors. Learn more

Enhance creativity & content creation

Marketing Create engaging marketing content, such as blog posts, social media updates, or email newsletters, saving time and resources.

Sales Generate personalized emails, messages based on a prospect's profile and behavior, improving response rates. Generate sales scripts or talking points based on the customer's segment, industry and the product or service.

Product development AI can generate multiple design prototypes based on certain inputs and constraints, speeding up the ideation phase, or optimize existing designs based on user feedback and specified constraints.

Accelerate process optimization

Document processing Improve business operations by automatically extracting and summarizing data from documents and insights through generative AI-powered question and answering. Learn more

Data augmentation Generate synthetic data to train ML models, when the original dataset is small, imbalanced or sensitive.

Supply chain optimization Improve logistics and reduce costs by evaluating and optimizing different supply chain scenarios. Learn more

Explore Generative AI Use Cases

Explore generative ai case studies.

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What leaders need to know about generative AI

Explore how to build generative ai responsibly, an introduction to generative ai with swami sivasubramanian, executive insights: perspectives from leaders at the intersection of business and technology, use cases in action, allen institute uses aws to map the whole human brain, bbva innovates in the financial services industry, omnicom builds the next generation of tools, accenture boosts productivity for their developers, generative ai in your business, light the way for business transformation, aws partner community to accelerate innovation, introduction to generative ai with aws leaders, tips to prepare your organization for generative ai, applying generative ai to product development.

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VMware vSphere Foundation

Enterprise workload engine with intelligent operations.

vSphere | Aria

Live Recovery Private AI Foundation

• Anywhere Workspace

Access any app on any device securely.

• Workspace ONE

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Build, deploy, manage and scale modern apps.

• VMware Tanzu

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Zero trust lateral security and software-defined app delivery.

• VMware Avi Load Balancer
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Empower distributed workloads with infrastructure and management.

• Edge Compute Stack
• VeloCloud SD-WAN
• Telco Cloud

Run VMware on any Cloud. Any Environment. Anywhere.

On public & hybrid clouds.

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Develop and test in a local virtualization sandbox.

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Accelerate and ensure the success of your generative AI initiatives with multi-cloud flexibility, choice, privacy and control.

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VMware Aria Operations

Proactive IT Operations Management VMware Aria Operations

Enable IT operations management for your private cloud environment with a unified, high-performance VMware Cloud Foundation platform.

VMware Aria Operations is no longer sold as a standalone product. Capabilities of this product are now available as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation .

Case Studies

Boost efficiency with proactive ops management.

Maximize ROI for Cloud Operations

Minimize unplanned downtime, reduce issue-resolution workloads, and capture savings when you deploy VMware Aria in your hybrid or multi-cloud environment.

Accelerate the Journey to Cloud

Simplify your hybrid cloud management, from migration assessment and planning to operationalizing the hybrid cloud in production.

Unify Visibility Across Clouds

Automate and streamline IT management with full-stack visibility from physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure, including virtual machines (VMs) and containers , to the apps they support.

Increase Operational Efficiency

Gain proactive planning and intelligent remediation to predict, prevent and troubleshoot faster with actionable insights. Monitor heterogeneous environments and make ML-powered management decisions.

Recognized Leader in AI-Operations

Read about the latest accolade received from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading IT analyst research firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum of IT management technologies.

Whats New in Aria Operations?

Explore the latest in VMware Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations and vRealize Operations Cloud).

VMware Aria Operations by the Numbers

Reduction in issue resolution time

Reduction in relative downtime

Reduction in last-minute hardware costs

VMware Aria Operations Capabilities

Continuous performance optimization.

Assure hybrid cloud performance at minimal cost. Real-time predictive analytics and AI automatically balance workloads and avoid contention.

Efficient Capacity and Cost Management

Using a forward-looking analytics engine, VMware Aria Operations predicts future demand, provides recommendations, and automates reclamation and rightsizing.

Integrated Compliance

Reduce risk and enforce regulatory standards with integrated compliance. Ensure your environments adherence to common requirements or create your own templates.

VMware [Aria Operations] works smoothly, without my influence. Im saving up to 10 hours a month on upgrades and troubleshooting. Stephan Wiechert, IT System Specialist

We saved about $1.5M with [VMware Aria Operations] helping us identify old hardware, appliances and storage thats not being used. Emilio Salguera, Principal Technical Architect

The work we've done with VMware will serve as a model for other states looking to consolidate and streamline their IT operations while improving security. Michael Allison, CTO

Learn, Evaluate, Implement

Explore technical documentation, reports, trial, communities and more.

View common question and answers about Aria Operations.

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• vRealize Operations (vROps) for Horizon | VDI Monitoring
• Extend VMware Aria Operations VMware Aria Operations for Integrations
• Proactive IT Operations Management VMware Aria Operations FAQ