Automated Modernization and Containerization of a
Critical Application with Amazon RDS and EKS
Customer Information
Location: Irving, TX
Industry: Telecommunications
Project Duration: 7 months
The Challenge – A Cost Effective and Time Efficient Application Modernization:
A telecommunications provider operating in the telecom hub of North Texas had an application critical to their business, one that was used for corporate ticketing and service management, that they wanted to be able to automatically scale based on fluctuating demand. The provider also wanted to see increased performance in their system that was starting to show its age. That meant they needed to update their on-premises, self-managed Kubernetes environment to the cloud. What they didn’t need was a lengthy, and cumbersome, downtime-plagued migration process. So they went to Matilda, which is known for its products (Discover and Migrate) that automate the migration and application modernization process.
Further complicating their situation was the complexity of their system. The application had hundreds of integrations, both third-party and in-house. As a business critical system with high data privacy requirements, continuous availability and secure operations of the application before, during, and after migration was crucial.
The AWS Services Utilized include: Elastic Kubernetes Service, Application Load Balancer, Lambda Functions, Elastic Load Balancer, Simple Notificatioin Service, Elastic Block Store, Elastic File System, S3 buckets, CloudWatch, Virtual Private Cloud, and Identity and Access Management
The Solution – Automated Migration and Modernization Tools from Matilda
The plan was to migrate the application to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), where they could reap the performance and scalability benefits of the cloud. Matilda Discover (Figure 1) identified the on-premises artifacts and application dependencies (Namespaces, Deployments, StatefulSets, RBAC roles, Custom Resource Definitions, Persistent Volumes, Persistent Volume Claims, and Storage Classes, etc.), and node metrics such as CPU, memory, networking, and storage utilization.
Figure 1: Matilda Discover – Automated Discovery of all Candidate Applications for Migration and their supporting Infrastructure
From this automated application discovery process, Matilda Migrate (Figure 2) provided a detailed assessment at both the application and infrastructure level of the cost and risk associated with a migration, including a TCO analysis. Migrate automated all of the analysis and planning required to migrate and modernize the application. This included security configurations and optimized resource allocation, and a logical group planning of applications based on environment, strategy, network, and data transfer dependencies (Figure 3). The database would be migrated from an on-premise Oracle instance to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).
Figure 2: Matilda Migrate – Automated Migration to the Cloud of Your Choice including Automated Landing Zone Creation, Automated Containerization, and Automated Modernization
Matilda Migrate starts with the applications which were discovered by Matilda Discover.
Figure 3: Applications promoted to Migrate
Migrate then takes a workflow approach to migrating the application to the target environment. The workflows take care of creating the Landing Zone for the application, creating the infrastructure as code (Terraform) needed to deploy the cloud environment, creating the installation scripts to install the migrated applications in the target environment, and containerizing the application.
Figure 4: The Workflows that Executed the Migration to AWS, RDS and EKS
The workflows that automate the containerization of the application are shown below.
Figure 5: The Workflows Executing the Containerization
The Results
Matilda Migrate was used to automate the migration of the application
to AWS and to automate the modernization and replatforming
of the application, providing the customer the following
benefits:
- Automated migration of the application and its supporting
services to AWS EKS (Figure 4) - A seamless database migration from an on-premise Oracle
instance to RDS - Automated containerization of the application (Figure 5)
- Improved application performance and scalability; the workflow was integrated with existing process for automated approval and notification systems
- Automated application modernization through generated infrastructure as code required to provision in the cloud
- A streamlined application deployment and validation process which reduced manual effort during migration by 70% and improved overall performance
- The ability for the application to run in a modern cloud environment leveraging modern cloud services (Figure 6)
- Newly enabled SNS notifications for monitoring infrastructure
Once the application was migrated and containerized by Matilda Migrate, and provisioned in the AWS environment, the architecture of the application was as shown below.
Figure 6: The migrated application architecture in AWS