Brewing Business Success: OpsGuru Leads AWS Migration for Global Distributor
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Background
The beverage industry is moving fast. New products and new product categories are attracting new customers and opening doors to new opportunities. But the associated business growth can stretch the capabilities of traditional IT solutions to reliably deliver business services and accommodate continued growth and success.
This was the challenge for a diversified beverage company, which has remote offices in Canada, the United States, and Ireland. The company grew organically from a one-person wine importer into an international brewer and distributor of popular beverage brands. The business was supported by a centralized data centre in Canada that runs business services such as HR, payroll, and invoicing workflow, along with a point-of-sale system and an event and catering system.
The Challenge
As the number of services required to run the business grew, the company became less comfortable with relying on a single, on-premises data centre to deliver its business services. It wanted to migrate to the cloud for more flexibility in how it deploys its workloads and add resilience by not relying on a physical data centre, which could be a single point of failure in the event of a service disruption. In addition, its monolithic Terraform workspaces were becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
To get started on its goal to migrate its workloads to the cloud to cut costs, improve resilience, and accommodate business and data growth with easier scalability, the company created a footprint in AWS with a team of two to manage it. But to achieve excellence in cloud operations, the company needed to upskill its on-premises workforce to be proficient in AWS and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Our Solution
OpsGuru helped make the customer’s AWS migration fast and efficient by using the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), which helps organizations speed up the migration process by avoiding common pitfalls and streamlining cloud adoption. The program helps organizations assess current workloads, estimate the financial benefits of adopting AWS, build AWS competency, and gain experience through migrating pilot workloads.
MAP is a three-phase methodology that helps organizations reduce complexity and costs while leveraging AWS cloud best practices to improve the success of an AWS migration:
- Assess: Identify capability gaps and create a total-cost-of-ownership model to justify a migration
- Mobilize: Quickly build competency and an operational foundation
- Migrate: Execute the migration plan and optimize the environment
Assess
In the Assess phase, OpsGuru helped the company prioritize its operational capabilities to align with its business goals. The assessment included a workload inventory, an optimization & licensing assessment (OLA), a migration readiness assessment, and an analysis to determine the total cost of ownership. OpsGuru also helped the company rightsize its AWS footprint to deliver the best performance at the lowest possible cost.
In addition, OpsGuru worked alongside the company’s IT team to document its on-premises application workflows and develop a migration strategy, which included a new architecture to promote internal knowledge sharing as more internal teams became more familiar with AWS.
Mobilize
In the Mobilize phase, OpsGuru built and tested the company’s infrastructure as code (IaC) model and helped it implement a “defence-in-depth” approach to its cloud security architecture that uses layered defences to protect systems and data. If one defence fails, another is available to block intrusion. In addition, OpsGuru consolidated security tools for simplicity and a zero-trust approach to access, and showed the customer best practices around how to use zero trust to meet its goals. To provide further data security, OpsGuru conducted a proof of concept for automated disaster recovery.
To prepare for the migration, OpsGuru developed a detailed migration plan for each application and selected a small group of applications with moderate risk and complexity to run pilot migrations. In addition, OpsGuru established a cloud operating model for the customer and established and implemented tagging standards for cost allocation and automated resource management. OpsGuru completed the Mobilize phase by establishing and implementing a centralized governance, risk, and compliance framework.
Migrate
In the migration phase, OpsGuru executed the remainder of the migration plan, implemented the cloud operating model, and integrated cloud security, monitoring, and alerting tools into the system. As a learning exercise for the company, OpsGuru conducted hands-on workshops to help the company refactor its existing monolithic workspaces. Hands-on practice with OpsGuru oversight helped the customer’s IT team familiarize themselves with Terraform best practices.
A key challenge for companies migrating to the cloud is upskilling existing IT professionals on cloud processes and best practices. OpsGuru brought the company’s IT team along on the cloud journey by providing it with a training path, documentation, hands-on workshops for each step of the migration, and test environments to support the upskilling process. OpsGuru also helped the company modernize its operation processes by replacing the traditional department-oriented structure with a life cycle approach to operations management using product management principles to deliver operations.
The Result
The company successfully completed all of its existing workloads and now has a roadmap for continuous improvement. It’s now identifying and prioritizing future work based on the roadmap, such as continuing to refactor applications for the cloud based on initial demonstrations from OpsGuru. The roadmap is supported by new processes and infrastructure to promote learning, sandboxing, and innovation while maintaining its monitoring, auditing, alerting, and compliance activities for business workloads. In addition, the company has clarity on governance using a shared responsibility model for internal stakeholders.
With its workloads securely in the cloud, and with new infrastructure, tools, and processes in place to deliver its business services, the company now has a fully modernized IT infrastructure that it can rely on to take its brewing and beverage business to the next level, and maybe even set the pace for the industry.