On-Premises to Cloud: Application Migration

About Customer:

One of Kerala's largest renowned universities, well recognized for offering a wide range of specialties for undergraduates, postgraduates and professional courses through its associated colleges, while keeping up with industry and market demands.

To increase the overall process & working efficiency, the university decided to migrate their services through applications, enabled on Cloud.

Until 2018, the university supported students in 300+ connected colleges by hosting physical servers, storage, and networking equipment in its own data centers and co-located data centers. The demand was also that there ought to be a 100% uptime guarantee & this was turning out to be a challenge, specifically during peak admissions time. The e-Payment for fees, Common Admission Program (CAP), and department subdomains, could not afford any downtime. It was unanimously decided to have a scalable infrastructure that could withstand the sudden exponential demand increase.

In order to meet demand peaks, the university decided that a public cloud service was the best option, as it combined availability with scalability and elasticity. As part of the university's evaluation of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amvion Labs Pvt Ltd., an Consulting Partner to AWS, ran the university's applications in a production environment and in a test and assessment mode for about six months.

With Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) serving as storage resources, the university is currently running Amazon Elastic Computational Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to offer the compute resources needed to execute its applications and services. Amazon Cloud Watch monitors and warns AWS resources as well as the university's applications and website. The institution additionally employs Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for the following benefits over a typical database system.

• 1. Reduced administrative burden by using the Amazon RDS Command Line Interface, the AWS Management Console with API calls for easy access to production-ready relational databases.
• 2. Performance with general purpose and supplied IOPS (SSD) storage.
• 3. Scalability with push-button computation, simple storage and read replica scaling.
• 4. With automated backups, database snapshots, multi-AZ deployments, and automatic host replacement, to increase availability and durability.
• 5. Security through network isolation and at-rest and in-transit encryption.
• 6. Governance of configurations, event notifications and manageability through metrics and monitoring.

The figure below illustrates the university’s cloud architecture in AWS:

Using AWS has provided numerous benefits to the university. The university’s website, applications and services are available 99.9999% of the time. When compared to on-premises and co-located datacenters, AWS offers significant reductions in personnel and datacenter facility costs. Throughout peak hours during the 2018-19 admission season, the AWS cloud handled 4500 - 5000 hits per second with zero second downtime. The university was also able to determine the exact compute resources being used during regular and peak hours, allowing them to downsize resources from on-premises and collocated datacenters and optimize them to just what was needed on the cloud, lowering operational costs.