case study aws migration

On-premises to AWS cloud migration: Step-by-step guide

Discover a comprehensive step-by-step guide for migrating from on-premises to aws cloud seamlessly, ensuring cost-efficiency, reliability, and enhanced performance. partner with experts for optimal implementation..

Step1: Migration preparation

Step 2: Planning and strategizing

Step 3: Design

Step 4: Migration and validation

Step 5: Operate and optimize

Approach cloud migration strategically

• Increased agility and scalability
• Improved performance and reliability
• Easy implementation of technologies
• Reduced costs

Comprehensive Migration to AWS Redshift  

Data Architecture Modernization with Multi-Cloud Strategy for Leading Manufacturing Company

Our client is a leading force in the information management and digital services industry. The Japanese multinational imaging and electronics company boasts a remarkable $18 billion in revenue and a workforce of over 90000+ employees. Renowned for their advanced digital copiers, peripherals, and customized products, they are at the forefront of innovation, shaping the future on a global scale. 

$18 billion in revenue 

Business Challenge   

In the landscape of global operations and an extensive network of customers, vendors, and partners, our client faced a challenge with scalability, time-to-market for products, and avalanching complexity from a highly complicated Data warehouse (DW) ecosystem.  

Over the years, their vastly expanding operations resulted in a suboptimal Data Warehouse (DW) ecosystem. The inability to respond promptly to market forces became an unavoidable consequence, highlighting the pressing need for a streamlined and agile solution to navigate the intricacies of their expansive business network.  

Block Quote  

The client faced challenges stemming from heavy customization that led to limited scalability for expanding its ecosystem with enhancements.  

Challenges leading to AWS Cloud Adoption  

From performance bottlenecks to delayed product launches, the hurdles without a cloud solution posed significant challenges. Collectively impacting the client’s data management and decision-making processes, the challenges were: 

Sluggish Reporting Performance  

The highly complex data warehouse structure contributed to a lagging reporting system, impacting the efficiency and responsiveness of the analytics framework. 

Impaired Time-to-Market for New Products  

Data fragmentation and siloed storage hindered the swift generation of actionable insights, creating bottlenecks in the product development and launch process. 

Inaccurate Troubleshooting  

The complexity of the implemented logic within Oracle scripts complicated issue identification and resolution, impacting the overall efficiency of problem-solving within the system. 

Fragmented Data Stitching Difficulties  

The existing on premises DW and reporting systems posed challenges in effectively stitching together disparate data parts, limiting the client’s capacity for holistic data analysis and strategic decision-making. 

The Hexaware Solution  

The Hexaware team undertook a strategic initiative to modernize the client’s legacy Data Warehouse (DW). The decision was clear: a migration to AWS Redshift.  

The move was aimed not only at enhancing overall efficiency, but at optimizing Advanced Analytics, AI/ML, and other cloud native capabilities. Our objective was to empower the business with the transformative potential of real-time data insights and reports, aligning their infrastructure with the demands of a dynamic, data-centric business landscape.  

Transforming Operations with AWS Cloud  

RAPID Data Warehouse/Data Lake  

Hexaware implemented RAPID, a centralized Data Warehouse/Data Lake solution, to address challenges associated with siloed data. This implementation enhances data accessibility but also boosts agility for operations, ensuring a more cohesive and responsive data environment. 

AWS S3 Framework for Oracle EPM  

Hexaware implemented an AWS S3 framework for Oracle EPM data storage, automating the storage process and eliminating the need for manual intervention. This framework not only enhances data security but also contributes to a more efficient and automated data storage system. 

Enhancement with Snowflake Data Tools  

HVR and Snowflake Logic Migration  

In a move to improve data pipeline efficiency, Hexaware migrated data pipelines and logic implemented in PL/SQL to HVR and Snowflake Connectors. This shift streamlines business logic and ensures real-time insights. 

Snowflake Connectors and IICS Lambda  

To enhance data replication and better handle business logic, we leveraged Snowflake Connectors and Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) Lambda functions. This implementation optimizes data handling. 

Custom Python Connectors for Snowflake  

Hexaware developed custom Python connectors for Snowflake, streamlining data integration and enabling the direct ingestion of application data. This strategic move ensures real-time analytics for business applications. 

Snowflake Integration for OBIEE & Qlik  

Hexaware optimized reporting efficiency by repointing reports in OBIEE & Qlik to Snowflake from existing databases. Consequently, Power BI for Business & IT facilitates more efficient data visualization and analysis. 

A flexible dimensional model for staging data marts was created, designed to adapt seamlessly for future releases. 

Multi Cloud Strategy  

The strength of diverse cloud platforms, optimizing flexibility and strategic advantage. 

Simplified Data Ecosystem  

Streamlined data landscapes in the cloud reduce complexity, for improved insights. 

Pooled in Product Data    

Siloed product data on a single platform speeds time-to-market.  

40% Faster Development Time  

Achieve a 40% reduction in development time with streamlined processes. 

30% TCO Reduction   

AWS Cloud migration resulted in a 30% Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) reduction.  

Enhanced Insights  

Unlock insights, real-time reporting, and faster time-to-market.  

Simplified Database   

Schema simplification leads to superior reporting system performance. 

Lower OPEX on Cloud  

Cloud operations result in lower operational expenses and improved ROI. 

Block Quote 

Optimized data processes with AWS Redshift accelerate development, reduce costs, and enhance insights, ensuring operational excellence. 

Enabling a transformative shift to the Cloud, our strategic migration to AWS Cloud unlocked valuable data insights, established real-time reporting capabilities, and significantly accelerated time-to-market for our client, fostering innovation and competitive advantage in a dynamic business landscape. 

AWS Cloud empowers businesses with a data-first move, catalyzing a paradigm shift towards agility, insights, and strategic advantage. 

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Case Study: Migration to the AWS Cloud

22/10/2021 |

Codete Team

We were tasked with preparing a migration plan for a client which had previously operated on premise. 

Challenge:  migration of 20+ applications from on-premise data center to the cloud.

The company ran Kubernetes clusters in their own data center, and they have selected AWS as their target cloud provider. The goal was to migrate over 20 applications with different tech stacks to the selected cloud solution, while keeping the majority of the apps online – or, at the very least, minimizing downtime to avoid affecting SLA.

Solution: Infrastructure-as-code approach & connectivity add-ons for EKS clusters

To spin up a new infrastructure, we decided to use Terragrunt, which assisted us in automating the creation of new environments for various groups of applications with minimal code duplication, combined with Terraform. We chose Jenkins and ArgoCD as CI/CD solutions. Applications have been relocated to EKS clusters. 

One of the most difficult challenges we faced was to maintain connectivity between the new and old infrastructure. After a thorough research, we decided to use VPN and CNI add-ons for EKS cluster to accomplish this. This way, we were able to gain control of the routes on both ends. As a result, our client’s 20+ applications have been successfully migrated to the AWS cloud. We managed to keep the majority of them online, only a small number of apps (4) had to be switched offline for a moment.

We applied the infrastructure-as-code approach throughout the process.

Results in numbers: 14 EKS clusters moved from an on-premise data center to the AWS cloud 20+ applications succesfully migrated (16 online at all times, 4 switched offline for a brief moment) hundreds - instead of thousands - lines of code few terabytes of data migrated from self hosted PostgreSQL (11) clusters to the AWS RDS service

• AWS (EKS, VPC, RDS, Aurora, S3, Cognito)
• docker images built in Jenkins
• CI/CD managed as a code
• ArgoCD for deployment orchestration
• Prometheus, Grafana and ELK stack for managing logs and metrics
• AWS VPN to establish connectivity between old and new infrastructure   

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Codete is an IT consulting and software development company. Since 2010, we’ve been supporting businesses worldwide in gaining competitive advantage by means of modern technology. We advise on digitalization, develop and implement high-quality solutions, and augment our clients’ teams with skilled software developers.

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Case Study: Incremental AWS Migration

Case study details.

• Technologies

A company that developed a platform aimed at increasing eCommerce sales through the recovery of abandoned shopping carts struggled with handling the increased data volume on its current hosting. Consequently, the company decided to migrate to AWS but wanted to do so incrementally to ensure the integrity of the service was not jeopardized.

The client’s SaaS business, which sends physical letters for online stores, outgrew its initial small-scale Windows setup due to increased data volumes. Migrating to AWS, they chose an incremental strategy to minimize risks, costs, and downtime, ensuring a smooth transition without disrupting service.

The first step in the incremental migration involved moving the system’s core to the new infrastructure while maintaining connectivity with components still on the old setup. This approach aimed to keep the system’s most crucial and maintenance-heavy part running on AWS, reducing costs and minimizing service disruptions during the transition.

The Addepto Team started by thoroughly reviewing the existing data pipeline and Data Operations, aiming to pinpoint inefficiencies and bottlenecks while setting actionable steps for improvement. Their strategy focused on adopting AWS best practices for deploying, monitoring, and governing data services to ensure scalability.

Recognizing that migration involves more than just relocating services due to differences in technology and architecture, the process demanded significant code revision and, often, complete rewriting to achieve compatibility and efficiency in the new environment.

From Windows to AWS: Smooth migration strategy ensures business continuity for SaaS platform

The client’s business was based on a SaaS platform that generates and sends traditional letters to consumers of online stores as a replacement for standard reminder emails, utilizing sales data.

The entire system was initially set up on a small-scale infrastructure relying on Windows.

As the business grew, this system proved insufficient to handle the increasing data volume, and upgrading to a higher package was not cost-effective. The company thus decided to migrate to AWS.

Migration is always a risky, time-consuming, and costly operation.

However, since migration is always a risky, time-consuming, and costly operation, they aimed to ensure the entire process would be safe and smooth without a significant amount of downtime during which services would be unavailable to users.

They opted for an incremental migration strategy, as it would allow them to mitigate these risks by breaking the migration down into manageable parts.

Our team expert opinion.

The business concept underwent a comprehensive transition to AWS, marking a complete technological renewal. Previously, the system that generated the PDFs operated on a sequential basis, which took a long time to process and was locking resources up. In contrast, our newly developed system enables all the microservices required for PDF generation to operate in parallel, dramatically slashing the time that was required to generate a batch of PDFs. This innovation not only boosted efficiency, resilience and fault-tolerance, but also elevated scalability. Now, it can handle huge spikes of job load in a quick manner, which could cause the old system to time out.

Addepto Team enhances data pipeline for efficient AWS migration

The Addepto Team began with a comprehensive examination of the existing data pipeline architecture and the Data Operations processes. This evaluation was aimed at identifying any inefficiencies and bottlenecks, as well as at setting clear, actionable recommendations for refining the data pipeline and establishing a streamlined, efficient Data Operations process.

The recommendations were based on best practices for deploying, monitoring, managing, and governing data services and solutions within the AWS ecosystem, ensuring that the approach adopted was scalable and effective for both current and future needs.

During project development, our team worked on:

• Migrating services to another infrastructure is never a straightforward task; it requires thorough code revision and refactoring. In practice, it often becomes apparent that the code needs to be completely rewritten. This complexity arises from the differences in underlying technologies, architecture constraints, and performance considerations between the old and new environments.
• Therefore, the migration process developed by the Addepto Team entailed more than a mere lift-and-shift; it required a deep dive into the codebase to ensure compatibility, efficiency, and scalability in the new infrastructure.

Incremental migration strategy begins with core service abstraction, ensuring seamless transition

The initial step in adopting an incremental migration strategy involved abstracting the core of the service and migrating it without losing connectivity with the rest of the system, which remained on the old infrastructure.

The objective was to ensure that the “heart of the system,” the most maintenance-intensive component, was operational on the new infrastructure while the remaining components stayed on the old one.

This strategy facilitated a smoother transition by prioritizing the migration of the most critical and resource-demanding part of the system, thereby reducing operational costs and minimizing disruptions to the overall service during the migration process.

Technologies that we use

Addepto Delivered

The deployment of the new solution on AWS resulted in significant cost savings, as the company could adopt a “pay as you go” cloud strategy, paying only for actual AWS usage instead of a flat fee for local server infrastructure.

However, the advantages extended beyond mere financial gains. The data flow saw considerable improvement through the integration of automation, making the system more fault-tolerant, easing the process of reruns, and eliminating logical errors. These enhancements in resilience and efficiency not only streamlined operational processes but also strengthened the overall infrastructure.

As a result, data management and processing became more effective and reliable, representing a major advancement towards a robust and dependable system.

• Fixed costs for local server infrastructure
• Manual data flow processes
• Higher likelihood of faults and logical errors
• Less efficient and reliable data management
• Adopted “pay as you go” AWS cloud strategy, leading to significant cost savings
• Improved data flow through automation integration.
• Increased fault tolerance, easier reruns, and reduced logical errors
• Streamlined operational processes
• Strengthened overall infrastructure
• Enhanced effectiveness and reliability in data management and processing

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We are a consulting company focused on delivering cutting-edge AI and Data-driven solutions.

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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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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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