IBM SoftLayer to AWS migration offered the advantage of lowering the cost, increasing the scalability and performance. Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped our client move faster as a company and manage project growth.
The Client: Online retailer. The company’s web-based shop carries more than 10,000 products and ships thousands of orders every day.
Industries: eCommerce, Retail.
Client Location: USA.
Project Length: June 2019 – Feb 2020.
Challenge: Build a cost-savvy, secure, scalable, and high-load system.
Services: DevOps, Cloud.
Tech: Cloud Flare, AWS DMS, RDS, S3, EC2, CloudFront, Ri’s vs Saving Plans, CI/CD (Jenkins), Apache, HAproxy.
The Problem: Low Performance and Height Hosting Cost
The client rented physical servers from the IBM SoftLayer. He was worried about a state of those physical servers and of a risk of possible breakage. It could cause a quite long downtime of the system – to restore the system and to replace the broken data or web server. Keeping a similar server in an on-hold mode was a quite expensive approach. Also, the client couldn’t build out capacity as and when it was needed. This caused performance, flexibility, and scalability issues.
For a client’s eCommerce business, the underlying technology is mission-critical to engage and sell to customers. The website traffic could fluctuate a lot from quiet times to campaign-driven traffic spikes. Scalability is critical for a company that experiences sales surges. The easier it is to scale, the easier it is to focus on its core work: delivering products to customers across the USA (and sometimes Canada and EU).
So, when the client began experiencing capacity issues, there was a choice: either invest in bigger boxes and more RAM or move to the cloud. Continuing to use a hoster meant spending between 25% to 50% more than was needed.
We wanted better performance, scalability, support, and flexibility in a solution that didn’t break the bank.
The Solution: Migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
After evaluating several solutions, it was decided to eschew the IBM Softlayer provider in favor of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloud Flare based on how strong its network proposition is.
Security and scalability—those two things were critical for us. By using CloudFlare, we got the protection we needed. It was easy to implement and very cost-efficient.
Ultimately, AWS represents one of the most advanced and reliable, cloud-based environments. It is not only cost-effective, but AWS has a far more extensive developer toolset available than IBM Softlayer.
The client’s business is running its website using core AWS services.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides resizable virtual computing resources. Multiple Availability Zones help to ensure that buyers have a reliable, always-on service site. Files are stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The client uses the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS MariaDB) to deliver a highly scalable primary database for staging and production systems. The AWS Database Migration Service (Amazon DMS) was used to migrate database from a source on-premises Mysql Server to an RDS MariaDB with ongoing replication without downtime.
⇒ Additional Reading: Top 3 Cloud Hosting Solutions for Startups and Small Business
Supporting major technologies, AWS brought the following benefits:
➤ Cost. When comparing the pricing, AWS gave better results for much lower pricing.
➤ Scalability. We created a system that is scalable and reliable.
➤ Security. eCommerce business can have its growth securely supported through AWS. The AWS Cloud has numerous 3rd parties certifications, so we felt safe knowing the data can be secure.
➤ UX. Compared to IBM, AWS is more mature in enterprise integration, developer services, scaling, technical support, and ease of deployment.
The Result
The advantages of migrating to the AWS cloud are obvious; the facts and numbers are showing it:
➤ Moving to AWS environment, the DevOps team had left almost the same configurations, while significantly improving scalability and performance.
➤ Saves 44% annually on hosting costs. Previously, the client spent tens of thousands of US dollars per year on hosting in IBM SoftLayer cloud infrastructure. After migration to AWS, the price was cut on 44% per year with better performance, stability, and scalability. That gave a number of $$,$$$ (5 digits) of savings per year.
Is a Migration from IBM to AWS Right for Your Organization?
Making a decision to utilize public cloud services for cost savings, scalability, and agile deployments is a foregone conclusion for most organizations.
Cloud migration is a procedure we’ve performed many times for a wide range of organizations, so please reach out to us if you want to learn more about IBM SoftLayer to AWS migration.
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If you are serious about improving your cloud infrastructure, please contact us to let us know a little bit more about your business and your project.
