[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Nobody can afford a lousy application and database affecting their well-established business especially if you are a leading omni-channel platform for end-to-end digitization and have 40 million customers across the globe.
For Shephertz Technologies Pvt. Ltd, the case was quite similar. Despite using Amazon Web Services, their applications and databases were experiencing spikes in RAM and CPU utilization and the security was often challenged by hackers. Alas! It was severally affecting their customer interest & market against their competitors. Having data as massive as 20TB, their only choice was to go for cloud.
Cloud Garage, with its years of experience as a trusted cloud services provider, moved their environment to Azure to meet all requirements. We created a complex hybrid cloud setup between two public clouds via Site to Site connectivity between Azure and AWS using Windows RRAS Server.
As a result:
- After migration to Azure ShepHertz acquired more customers and their customer base increased to 300% in the last couple of quarter and is growing at the same rate which is phenomenal.
- Before migration they were using about 85 Servers on AWS and now this has increased to 400 Servers on Azure running and growing.
Problem Faced by ShepHertz
Previously the environment was hosted on Linux VMs having complex components of Big Data analytics, HA and BCP, Application and Infrastructure Level Security setting, Redis cache and performance accelerators on AWS and they decided to move them to Azure with a huge amount of data (appx. 20TB).
ShepHertz was facing a lot of problems on AWS. They were hosting their Redis Cache on Linux VMs which was also a challenge as it was causing performance issues. Their environment was vulnerable to the hackers which kept their IT team busy always finding a way to detect and prevent the attacks on their environment. Lack of the PaaS support in the AWS was also a problem as they were using VMs for hosting all kind of applications resulting excessive cost. Also, they were deploying their environment manually resulting in more time consumption to bring their setup up and running. These were the major cause due to which they were losing customer interest & market against their competitors.
As they have 40 million customers across the globe, it was necessary to keep their environment up and running during the migration as well. The challenge of environment migration without any downtime and with huge Cassandra DB (10TB), MongoDB (appx. 4 TB) & MySQL Database (2TB) required good expertise and this is where CloudGarage stepped in.
Solution by CloudGarage:
CloudGarage created the fresh and secured environment as it was on AWS using various security features like Application Gateway, NSGs. We also migrated their existing Application Servers to Azure App Services with VNET integration so that the Application can directly communicate to the MySQL Cluster using private IP through proxy, which increased the security of the setup and was cost optimised as we used Azure PaaS offerings. Few of the low-end Database Servers were in HA on AWS thus increasing expenses and required more time in management.
We moved them to Azure Premium Storage (SSD) Supported VMs for the better database performance and High SLA. On AWS ShepHertz’s Redis Cache was hosted on VMs for session management, but that was not efficient and was causing performance issues. CloudGarage proposed to use Azure Redis Cache PaaS offering and migrated their Redis Service to the same which reduced their VM management time and is more efficient and scalable.
We created replicated environment on Azure behind the Traffic Manager (Failover mechanism) for Application Servers and started pulling all the data from AWS to Azure and kept both the sites up and running until their entire setup was replicated on Azure. After the successful data transfer, we pointed the DNS on Traffic Manager to Azure. CloudGarage also automated the whole deployment process by creating Azure CLI script which deploys the environment with all the components needed for the setup like MySQL, Tomcat, Jenkins, Git, Apache PostGres SQL etc. which reduced the time and the efforts of the IT Team if the ShepHertz.
As mentioned earlier, when ShepHertz was using AWS they were not completely happy with Performance and the Costing.
On Azure are leveraging the flexibility of Azure Managed Disks, high performance of Azure Premium Storage, Azure PaaS Offerings for many of their Applications, Application Gateway for SSL offloading, NSG for enhanced Security, Redis Cache for Session Management Etc., and thus their environment is fully cost & performance optimized and is more secure than ever.
CloudGarage have also automated their environment and made their deployment process more efficient by creating Azure CLI Script for multiple deployments. Now it’s the matter of just few clicks and their environment on Azure is ready-to-run with all the required components installed in them. This reduced lots of efforts of their IT Team.
Challenges faced by us:
- Created a parallel environment on Azure with SSD as AWS.
- Connected both the clusters using the VPN tunnel created before.
- Modified the application to write to both environment.
- Configured Application servers to read from live environment only.
- Executed nodetool-repair on the parallel environment.
- Once full sync was achieved, we modified the application to point to the new environment.
- After the Azure environment was fully synced, we connected Cassandra cluster at Azure DC sync from the completely consistent AWS environment.
Benefits:
- Ease of Use: CloudGarage brought automation in their environment by creating deployment scripts and managing the existing environment using Azure Automation.
- PaaS Adoption: Encouraged ShepHertz to opt server less cloud computing (PaaS) and made their existing environment compatible to the PaaS
- Azure Big Data Adoption: ShepHertz is leveraging Azure’s big data solutions to get the real-time user data, which it supplies to marketers.
- Security Enhancements: Application Gateway(WAF) with dual different listeners (443 & 80), SSL offload and SNI Support encouraging ShepHertz to deploy safe and secure Application environment on Azure
A success opens the door to opportunities and growth:
CloudGarage has had numerous such engagements in all segments. We have been closely working with Microsoft DX and Technical Evangelists team to optimize customer’s performance, efforts and to explore and use more Azure Services. CloudGarage are working on DocumentDB for lesser latencies, high-performance, Scale data throughput and storage independently and elastically, consistency and enterprise grade SLA for NoSQL Databases and Azure Data Factory for cloud data integration service, to compose data storage, movement, and processing services into automated data pipelines orchestrating with the help of the local Microsoft concerned team. Microsoft team also helped us in setting up the Hybrid Cassandra Cluster between AWS and Azure.
Apart from ShepHertz’s we have also been involved with WizIQ, GenPact, ExtraMarks, and many more ongoing POCs. The future looks bright for us.
“Microsoft’s platform complements our solutions perfectly. The support from Microsoft has also been phenomenal. From a business perspective, when any attention was required, we had a response in a day’s time. The right people are always deployed for a task. Microsoft sells through partners who have been very supportive.” – Siddhartha Chandurkar (Founder & CEO of Shephertz)
Source: https://enterprise.microsoft.com/en-in/customer-story/industries/it-ites/shephertzs-back-end-solution-leads-front-azure/
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