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AWS Case Study

A brave new world - moving to Serverless Microservices. We reduced monthly costs by 80% and built service agility and scalability so this customer can now focus on growing its business

A platform to ……………………………….

The challenges faced

Our customer was running its operational software on a cloud based infrastructure comprised of servers, storage, networking, and associated systems. Their initial deployment into AWS was a lift from a physical infrastructure of a very old environment, primarily based around an open-source relational database management system and data integration platform built to connect a variety of data sources and applications, and perform analytics and ETL processes.

However due to the age and a lack of deep expertise of the infrastructure it was impossible to fully support, undertake any development and add value to the business in creating new products, or adding new features and functions.

The infrastructure represented a significant overhead to the business to support, represented high risk and was running at a high monthly costs in AWS. 

Solution

Having worked with this customer for a year building analysis and custom dash boarding Layer 9 presented a solution to rearchitect the infrastructure away from a very traditional set of databases and servers and move to a micro-service based architecture.

This represented a significant investment in collaboration due to the need to completely decompose the existing infrastructure to understand all the processes and practices inherited. In addition migrating over 15 years of data, analysis and reporting. as well as, providing continuous support to their existing customers with little or no disruption was critical to the success of the project. 

After developing a road map to develop the relevant building blocks the first phase of the project was to profile and categorise data assets, data sets, analytical models and their relationships with the local services supporting the platform.

We developed data catalogues as a single source of truth and reimagined how data would be ingested, saved and analysed as a future proofed architecture.

Once the data was understood the remaining building blocks, ingesting data, requests from local servers, validating processes, analytical models and visual web apps were developed and run in parallel to the existing infrastructure. 

Following extensive testing the new environment went into a production state and the old services were decommissioned. 

The value

The project delivered several benefits for our customer, including improved data quality, with the initial phase providing the cleanest , clearly understood data.

The ability to onboard new customers and provide services to meet new customer requirements very quickly.

To mitigate risks associated with a lack of knowledge of the the infrastructure and services. The new environment was build with simplicity in mind. While the companies services hold some complexity the ability to create microservices for different functions has created a 

While cost was an important consideration,