Successful Cloud migration and introduction of 24/7 DevOps.
Silicon Valley-based SaaS company | 2020/2021
Accomplishments
Availability:
from 99,8% to 99,999%
Avg request
response time:
+ 50%
Global delivery:
massively improved
Financials:
€600k p.a. cost savings
+300% traffic-to-cost ratio
60% staff cost reduction
The Company
The company is a true pioneer in EdTech with a SaaS learning solution for Fortune 500 companies and their global workforces.
The Challenge
Due to the successful global roll-out of the company’s tutoring system, usage increased rapidly by 80% and became truly global with users from 100+ different countries.
Meeting agreed upon SLAs with its largest clients became challenging. 24/7 availability was no longer good enough.
In addition, the infrastructure was not scalable enough to support the company’s growth path. Too much manual intervention was required to keep operations going. Both server cost and staff cost went up significantly. DevOps support needed to become 24/7.
What needed to be done
The application’s infrastructure was on premise and run on a VM ware cluster with hundreds of servers for all staging areas. It needed to be migrated to the cloud with the following requirements:
- Migration from on-premise to the AWS cloud
- Getting legacy SaaS application cloud-ready
- Manage as infrastructure-as-code (IaC)
- Compliance with GDPR and ISO 27001
- Introduction of 24/7 DevOps
The Resource Challenge
The company had a skills and resource gap for this undertaking. Recruiting efforts for the right talent in Europe were not successful for nine months.
The virtual in-house Team Approach
India team: 4 AWS experts
Management: AWS architect out of Germany
Team ramp-up time: 2 months
Duration: 9 months end-to-end
Ongoing: India stayed on permanently for 24/7 site reliability engineering The 6 FTE-team in Germany was phased out
The Infrastructure Stack
Testimonial
‘In the beginning, I was skeptical that a team in India could really help on such a complex project, but I was wrong. The expert team we could not find in Europe for almost a year, we got in only two months. They really understood our challenges and were managed well both in India and in Europe until the job was done. The quality was great and the cost to value ratio is probably one of the best I have ever seen.’
Thorsten Grote
VP Infrastructure Engineering
2020/2021