Executive Summary & Engagement Scope
Wolters Kluwer wanted to migrate their flagship product, Ovid, to a more sustainable platform. The existing Ovid platform was based on decades-old technology, which was not sustainable for future maintenance and application enhancements. The customer wanted to breathe new life into the already-existing application. The components on the Windows Server 2008 needed to be migrated.
Engagement Drivers
The principal objective involves migrating the application to cloud while addressing the following points:
- Migrating the application to the cloud to optimize resources accordingly
- Implementing build and testing automation for improved efficiency
- Upgrading the drivers and libraries that help maximize productivity
Proposed Solution
People Tech Group began its solution implementation by conducting a thorough analysis of the existing application’s architecture to strategize a comprehensive migration plan for the customer.
- Plan was to migrate 2.5 million lines of code from legacy datacenter platform to the cloud (over 70 applications)
- Our solution involved going-live with Ovid services on Linux and Windows servers deployed in AWS US and EU regions (NoVa and Dublin) in an Active-Active configuration
- The legacy solution was built by hand, plan was to implement full DevOps automation of builds and deployment using Jenkins and Chef
- Our solution enabled interoperability among existing Content Generation System and other business systems
- Migrated and recompiled the code, while updating the third party components
- Utilization of F5 load balancers and an AWS WAF Solution helped mitigate attacks
- Configuring the AWS EC2 instances and the auto-recovery feature aid in safeguarding the environment
- Created new automated test scripts, to optimize the resources
- Utilization of AWS Snowball helps to transfer 15 Terabytes of production data to the cloud swiftly
- Extensive load and failover testing was planned to ensure smooth operations and optimization of the resources in production
- Usage of Route 53 helped in a seamless global traffic management
AWS Services Used as Part of the Solution
Route53: This is a sophisticated DNS management and registration services provided by AWS. The DNS service was migrated from NTT to AWS Route53.
Security Group (SG): AWS firewall uses stateful inspection technology to protect AWS resources such as instances/servers or other components.
Network Access List (NACL): Unlike the security groups which operate at the instance level and are stateful, NACLs are stateless and operate at the subnet level, adding another layer of protection.
AWS WAF: The Web Application Firewall service by AWS protects layer-7 traffic, specifically HTTP/HTTPS.
AWS EC2: The auto-recovery feature and the configured instances help in continuity of operations, while securing the environment
AWS Network Load Balancer: This is an AWS service that distributes end user traffic across multiple cloud resources to ensure low latency and high throughput for applications.
AWS Advanced Shield: This is an AWS service that works with other edge services such as Route53, AWS WAF, ELB to ensure their protection against DDOS attacks.
AWS CloudTrail: Logging of all events in the cloud was done through AWS CloudTrail, which records all API calls made in a particular environment.
AWS Snowball: This helps in transferring data at a faster rate while safeguarding the information.
Microsoft Workloads on AWS
Windows Server: Used for Identity Management with Active Directory
Microsoft SQL Server: for high-performance transactional data management and control
Legacy Architecture
AWS End State Architecture (Northern Virginia for US; Dublin for EU)
Third party solutions or applications used
- SQL Server and Oracle Databases
- Oracle Golden Gate replication between various cloud regions was used for the Db data
- NetApp NFS Cluster
- AD CMS offering
Outcomes
- Savings of over $1.5M per year
- Increased application performance in terms of response times
- Created a future-ready and scalable cloud platform
- Migrated and secured a large amount of data using AWS cloud
- Application modernization to the latest versions of all technologies provides enhanced security and maintainability
- Addressed legacy component security and support issues
- Over 1000 reusable test cases were automated providing assurance the application functionality was maintained in the transition and providing a comprehensive test suite for testing future changes
Lessons Learned
- Building a reusable migration platform environment on AWS that can be used for additional application migrations and POCs
- Leveraging automation assets and frameworks to accelerate CI/CD automation
- Engaging stakeholders and experts early on to maximize productivity
