Introduction

As businesses navigate a rapidly changing technological environment, migrating on-premises data centers and applications to the cloud has become essential for achieving greater scalability, agility, and cost efficiency. A leading global provider of flavors and fragrances partnered with Intuitive to modernize their legacy systems by transitioning to AWS Cloud. This large-scale migration covered over 25 applications and services, requiring solid planning and innovative technical solutions.

Challenges

The migration project posed several significant challenges:

1. Complex Infrastructure: The organization’s IT environment included a wide array of resources such as virtual machines, databases, storage systems, and networking components.
2. Application Refactoring: Certain legacy applications needed to be refactored to align with modern containerization and orchestration standards.
3. Operational Continuity: Ensuring uninterrupted operations and minimizing disruptions during the migration process.
4. Compliance and Security: Meeting industry-specific regulatory requirements while implementing effective security measures.
5. Standardization: Introducing standardized tools and processes for infrastructure deployment and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD).

Technology Solutions

To overcome these challenges, Intuitive delivered the following technology solutions:

1. Comprehensive Migration Strategy:
   • Migrated over 25 applications alongside supporting services, including EC2 instances (Windows and Linux servers), RDS databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle), and storage solutions (S3 buckets, EFS file systems, Storage Gateways).
   • Designed and deployed Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), subnets, security groups, and network ACLs to establish a secure and scalable network infrastructure.
2. Application Refactoring:
   • Refactored selected applications from EC2 to containerized environments using AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS).
   • Leveraged Docker for containerization and optimized workloads for improved performance and scalability.
3. Standardized Tooling:
   • Implemented Terraform for automated and repeatable infrastructure provisioning.
   • Integrated CloudBees/Jenkins for CI/CD pipelines to streamline application deployments and updates.
4. Identity and Access Management (IAM):
   • Established Active Directory services for user authentication and authorization.
   • Created granular IAM policies to control access to cloud resources securely.
5. Compliance and Security:
   • Applied industry best practices to safeguard sensitive data.
   • Configured security groups, network ACLs, and encryption mechanisms to ensure data protection.

Design Solutions

In the original setup, we relied heavily on EC2 instances for various services:

• EC2 Instances: Hosted the web application and managed the database, Redis cache, and OpenSearch engine.
• Single Point of Failure: The EC2 instances managing the database, caching, and OpenSearch presented a significant single point of failure. Any instance failure could lead to downtime and data unavailability.
• Manual Scaling and Maintenance: Each of these components required constant monitoring, manual scaling, patching, and updating.
• Operational Complexity: The team had to focus on backups, failover, and ensuring high availability manually.

Post-modernization architecture

Post-modernization architecture

In the modernized setup, we transitioned from EC2-managed components to AWS-managed services. Here's a breakdown of the new architecture:

• ECS for Web Application: The web application is now hosted on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), leveraging the scalability and ease of deployment of containers. This allowed us to scale the application more efficiently without managing the underlying EC2 instances.
• Aurora PostgreSQL: migrated the database hosted on EC2 to Aurora, benefiting from automated backups, scalability, and better failover mechanisms. Aurora's performance and high availability reduce the need for manual database management.
• ElastiCache (Redis): Offloaded caching responsibilities to Amazon ElastiCache, which manages Redis clusters, ensuring high throughput and low latency while handling scaling automatically.
• Data Migration: We used AWS DataSync to seamlessly transfer data from EFS to the new environment, minimizing downtime. For database migration, AWS DMS helped us move the database with minimal disruption, ensuring data integrity and quick cutover.
• Secrets Management: Sensitive information such as database credentials was stored securely in AWS Secrets Manager. We followed the principle of least privilege access, ensuring that only authorized resources could retrieve the secrets.

Results and Impact

The migration and modernization project delivered measurable results:

1. Enhanced Scalability and Agility:
   • Leveraged AWS’s scalable infrastructure to adapt to evolving business demands.
2. Cost Optimization:
   • Achieved significant cost savings through efficient resource utilization and automated provisioning.
3. Operational Resilience:
   • Maintained uninterrupted service delivery with detailed migration planning and execution.
4. Streamlined Operations:
   • Standardized infrastructure deployment and CI/CD processes, reducing manual intervention and enhancing productivity.
5. Improved Security and Compliance:
   • Strengthened data security and ensured compliance with industry regulations, building trust and reliability.

Conclusion

Intuitive’s cloud migration expertise empowered the flavors and fragrances leader to transform their legacy IT environment into a scalable, secure, and efficient cloud-based infrastructure. By leveraging AWS services and adopting standardized tools like Terraform and Jenkins, the project not only fulfilled the client’s immediate objectives but also laid a solid foundation for sustained innovation and growth in the industry.