Global procurement consultancy slashes IT spend with DevOps-enabled AWS migration
Amdocs led a migration and modernization program to AWS, unlocking over 70% in initial cost savings while enabling the enterprise to fully leverage cloud computing services.
About the customer:
The leading procurement consultancies, operated globally with offices in Europe, North America and the Middle East. It helps organizations reduce costs, improve internal processes and upskill procurement teams to achieve measurable and sustainable cost savings. Its proprietary platform eFlow is a key differentiator, offering procurement intelligence and best practice guidance for customers.
Constrained by traditional hosting
As with many fast-growing businesses, the enterprise was increasingly frustrated at the limitations of its traditional managed hosting provider. To maximize its potential in the digital economy, the business needed a new cloud-based IT platform offering a higher level of resilience, flexibility and scalability. It also needed to keep a tight rein on costs, and the ability to react dynamically to changeable market demands.
The existing platform was built across public and private cloud, consisting of around 200 virtual servers. Code was held in GitLab and most applications were written in the PHP-consuming MySQL/MariaDB and PostgreSQL databases. All of this resulted in high monthly costs, besides which the available capacity was not being used efficiently or effectively.
Chronic problems included a lack of disaster recovery and a long lead time for changes . Scaling was a lengthy and one-way process, so instances that only needed resource temporarily locked the enterprise into additional long-term costs.
Migrate and modernize: moving to AWS
Amdocs was engaged to advise on the most appropriate cloud provider for the enterprise’s needs, then assist with the early phase of the migration. The goal was to lay firm foundations that the enterprise could build quickly. Following a Migration Readiness Assessment and Migration Evaluator session we recommended moving the main application stack and dependent resources to AWS.
The enterprise already had some experience using the third party solutions Terraform and Puppet, so we opted to extend the scope of these to drive infrastructure improvements. Building on the team’s existing knowledge in this way reduced risk and enabled faster progress.
“Amdocs' synergy with the enterprise played a vital role in the migration's success. It created a positive environment where our team had the confidence to learn new skills and embrace modern ways of working.”
Technical overview
Using the AWS cloud platform meant we could automate the scalability of applications while enabling applications to interact more effectively. We set up an AWS landing zone with Transit and NAT gateways, in alignment with AWS Well-Architected Framework best practice guidelines.
We also undertook three proof of concept migrations to demonstrate processes and provide repeatable methods that could be adopted by the enterprise’s in-house team.
Firstly, we conducted a lift and shift for a legacy application. This was the most appropriate method in the circumstances as the application was due to be retired in 18 months.
The next approach involved re-hosting existing applications on EC2 instances, using Puppet for deployment. This approach will be applicable to the bulk of the enterprise’s infrastructure, so it was useful to include it within our remit. We’ve been able to calculate how long it takes to migrate applications in this way, so the enterprise can determine the best time to give notice to the existing managed hosting provider. This will ensure any dual running costs are kept to a minimum.
Finally, we used Packer to generate EC2 AMIs to deploy an autoscaling, highly available, refactored alternative to the re-hosting approach.
Before our appointment, the enterprise had made some inroads using Terraform for infrastructure as code. We took this to the next stage, deploying a Well-Architected landing zone that included up to date Terraform Templates, then providing full training for the enterprise’s technical teams. We also used the third party GitLab tool for CI/CD pipelines.
Reduced costs, better resilience, dynamic scalability
AWS offered many potential benefits for the enterprise. Taking a DevOps-led approach to the migration enabled them to be achieved more quickly.
The proof of concept migrations handled by Amdocs immediately reduced infrastructure spend by more than 70 percent, helped in part by the rightsizing of instances. Infrastructure as code and automation will deliver further benefits, such as enhanced operability, better cost management and dynamic scalability.
Using AWS instead of a traditional managed hosting provider also provides better visibility of metrics, enhanced resilience to failures and better control of security.
Altogether, this gives the enterprise a more robust, adaptive and cost-effective IT infrastructure that is able to support future business developments.
The stand-up of the infrastructure was fast and effective thanks to Amdocs' input. Whenever we encountered challenges, they had the flexibility and engineering skill to help us resolve them fast.
A modern way of working
Going forward, the enterprise is in a strong position to embed better ways of working and reduce technical debt. The team knows how to take full advantage of the self-service nature of cloud and has the confidence to mature its operations capabilities, allowing more time and space for innovation.
