A market-leading logistics solutions company is undergoing a major digital transformation to provide its customers with a SaaS-based offering, tailored to meet the needs of clients of all sizes. BBD was tasked with analysing their existing environment and modernising their application suite onto AWS. This ongoing initiative ensures that customers experience a seamless transition to new or modernised workloads without disruption. In addition to the migration and modernisation of workloads, BBD assisted the customer in establishing robust cloud operational practices, including cloud governance, financial management, monitoring, observability, and overall operational management within their AWS environment.
Objectives:
The client required a full refactor and re-architecture of their existing on-premises servers and applications into a newly provisioned AWS environment. The initial objective was to create a Proof of Concept (PoC) to extend their application portfolio while understanding the complexities and benefits of cloud-hosted workloads. A major focus was placed on enabling the client’s team by:
- Providing migration experience and enabling the customers team to operate within AWS
- Automating previously manual tasks to reduce administrative overhead
- Establishing strong governance to enforce compliance within the AWS environment at scale
- Implementing a monitoring and observability framework tailored to the cloud environment
- Assisting the customer in implementing sound cloud financial management practices
Benefits:
- Simplified billing mechanisms that reduce administrative overhead
- Improved cost control to gain better insight into operational running costs
- Enhanced client onboarding processes
- Modernised tech stack ensuring future relevance
- Seamless system use that continued without interruption during the migration
- Cloud Operations enablement in key areas:
- Cloud Governance
- Cloud Financial Management
- Monitoring & Observability
- Operations Management
Solution Overview:
BBD undertook a manual assessment of the client’s distributed, on-premises workloads, analysing their hardware requirements and determining the required AWS resources. The solution and migration approach followed a strangler pattern, modernising and migrating services incrementally. BBD built an AWS Control Tower Landing Zone, aligned with compliance and AWS best practices, and set up a multi-tenancy Kubernetes-based container platform on Amazon EKS to host the client’s SaaS offerings.
By following a MAP 2.0 framework, BBD reduced migration costs while aligning the client with the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF). Workshops and training sessions were conducted to upskill the client’s teams, enabling them to take ownership of their new AWS environment.
Approach:
The approach aligns with the MAP framework, leveraging the MAP program to optimise migration costs and strategically manage the long-term modernisation initiative. Following a phased approach, BBD employed the strangler pattern to incrementally modernise and integrate application workloads, gradually transitioning from a monolithic architecture to microservices.
Throughout the migration, the challenge of managing multi-master replication arose, as some workloads operated on AWS while others remained on-premises. To address this, BBD developed a custom-built replication service that effectively managed risk and orchestrated data replication.
To support the initiative, BBD was employed to manage the AWS-hosted workloads, providing the necessary capacity and expertise for the hybrid-hosted application. This partnership allows the client to focus on modernisation, operational enablement, and organisation-wide upskilling, while BBD handles the operational complexities of the cloud environment. This collaboration ensures a seamless transition and long-term success by addressing both immediate and future needs efficiently.
Client enablement:
To ensure the client is well-prepared for both current and future needs, BBD has played a crucial role in guiding the client toward an optimised cloud operational model. This collaboration has focused on enhancing key aspects of cloud operations, including financial management, governance, operational management, compliance, and monitoring and observability, all within the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF).
As part of the ongoing handover process, BBD conducts a series of enablement workshops designed to progressively train the client’s internal teams in cloud best practices. These workshops cover:
- Operational management: Training on best practices for monitoring, scaling, and governance to equip the client with the skills to manage their cloud infrastructure effectively. This includes patch management and automation, backup scheduling, and setting up a new monitoring and observability (M&O) stack
- Cloud financial management: Insights into cloud cost control, budgeting, and optimisation strategies. This involves cost allocation tagging, account consolidation, and mechanisms such as budget alerting, cost anomaly detection, EC2 Savings Plans, and RDS Reserved Instances to manage and reduce cloud expenditures
- Governance: Comprehensive training on AWS governance best practices, focusing on the establishment of guardrails and Service Control Policies (SCPs) to ensure robust control and alignment with the operational structure
- Compliance: Guidance on maintaining adherence to industry standards and regulations, utilising tools like AWS Config and SecurityHub for automated compliance monitoring and policy enforcement
- Monitoring and observability: Assistance in setting up a comprehensive monitoring and observability framework. This training includes integrating various tools and resources to track and analyse system performance, ensuring alignment with the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework
Services utilised:
1. Governance:
BBD deployed a custom AWS Control Tower Landing Zone to establish a robust governance structure for the customer’s AWS environment. This setup included:
- AWS Organizations for centralised account management and billing
- Guardrails and Service Control Policies (SCPs) to enforce security, compliance, and operational best practices
- AWS Config for continuous configuration compliance
The objective of this approach was to establish a secure, compliant, and scalable cloud foundation that adheres to both AWS Well-Architected Framework standards and industry-specific regulatory requirements.
2. Cloud financial management:
For cloud financial management, BBD simplified the billing mechanisms by moving to a managed services model and implementing best practices for ongoing cost management:
- Cost allocation tagging for tracking expenses across multiple clients and environments
- AWS Cost Explorer to monitor and optimise cloud spend in real-time
- Reserved Instances and Savings Plans for EC2 and RDS, reducing operational costs by up to 30%
- Amazon S3 for cost-effective storage solutions
A 5-year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis was conducted, which included an assessment of hardware depreciation, projected cloud costs with optimised resource allocation, cost benefits of moving from a CapEx to an OpEx model, and savings through automation.
3. Monitoring & Observability:
BBD implemented a comprehensive monitoring and observability stack to ensure the client’s operations were well-monitored and performant:
- Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail for log monitoring and auditing
- Grafana for real-time performance metrics visualisation
This setup allowed the client to track performance metrics, error rates, and service-level objectives (SLOs) in real-time, significantly reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) for operational issues.
4. Compliance & Auditing:
To ensure compliance with industry standards and internal policies, BBD implemented:
- AWS GuardDuty and AWS SecurityHub for continuous security threat detection and compliance checks
- Amazon Certificate Manager for SSL/TLS certificate management
- Amazon RDS for encrypted database services
These services ensured that the client’s AWS environment adhered to regulatory compliance requirements, providing robust auditing and reporting capabilities.
5. Operations Management:
In terms of operations management, BBD established a cloud operations model for long-term success:
- Automation of operational tasks such as backups, patch management, and scaling
- Development of a CI/CD pipeline using AWS native DevOps tools
- Implementation of a multi-tenancy architecture on Amazon EKS for performance isolation
Impact of BBD’s partnership:
BBD’s partnership resulted in a scalable AWS environment that not only supported the client’s current needs but also provided a solid foundation for future expansion. The new application developed by BBD introduced a new revenue stream for the client, while subscribing to BBD’s Cloud Managed Services allowed the client to offload operational responsibilities and focus on their core business needs all while upskilling to take over cloud operations in future. Key benefits included:
- Ongoing cloud financial management and optimisation
- Proactive monitoring and observability for infrastructure and workloads
- Enhanced compliance and security auditing
- Streamlined operations management, improving efficiency and reducing costs
Through this collaboration, the client is well-positioned for continued innovation and growth in the logistics SaaS market.
