DevOps Adoption Case Study: Developing an AWS Cloud Migration Path

Flux7 had the opportunity to work with an enterprise media group on its IT modernization project in which it had determined an AWS cloud migration was the ideal path. The challenge faced by the customer and Flux7 DevOps team was that the customer was under pressure to move these applications, which numbered into the hundreds, to AWS within one year. Today’s blog is the story of how we partnered with the customer to develop a migration approach for its ongoing AWS DevOps adoption.

Critical to this project’s success was beginning with a thorough application assessment. We started by assembling a COE team comprised of representatives from the customer and Flux7. A cross-functional team of developers, networking, infrastructure, and infosec engineers, the COE conducted a thorough assessment and gap analysis of the company’s application portfolio. This allowed us to strategically migrate applications, maximizing cloud benefits for those applications that would gain the most while not spending resources on applications that would benefit minimally.

The COE walked through the migration options for its on-premise applications and built a secure sandbox where business units could experiment and learn. From these exercises, the COE created a 12-month roadmap, broken down by quarter, mapping each application to its migration path and a specific timeline. This plan enabled the COE to build and replatform two of the firm’s apps with application-specific code pipelines within just 16 weeks.

Flux7 Enterprise DevOps Framework

Using the Flux7 Enterprise DevOps Framework (EDF), the COE identified systems of Innovation and Differentiation; it also identified 200+ apps as systems of record that were subsequently separated from the strategy. The COE designed a platform for innovation. The first part of the platform built was a Landing Zone which consisted of an account hardening, VPC design, IAM and EC2 systems manager.

Of the firm’s 400 apps, those in queue for application replatforming included:

• Nearly 100 .Net IIS apps on Windows
• 50+ Java/Tomcat apps that are to be containerized and replatformed to Kubernetes on AWS
• ~100 Java/Tomcat apps to be replatformed to AWS Ec2 Linux instances with auto-scaling, ELB, and RDS
• Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)
• Atlassian tools
• WordPress
• A CRM cluster
• Multiple SOLR search clusters
• An in house serverless Lambda-based application

With this foundation and AWS migration strategy in place, the COE created patterns based on common repeatable applications. These patterns will help speed the process even further for subsequent applications; the COE plans to replatform over 100 apps to AWS in 2018 and move two entire data centers to AWS.