DevOps.com

  • Latest
    • Articles
    • Features
    • Most Read
    • News
    • News Releases
  • Topics
    • AI
    • Continuous Delivery
    • Continuous Testing
    • Cloud
    • Culture
    • DevSecOps
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • Leadership Suite
    • DevOps Practice
    • ROELBOB
    • DevOps Toolbox
    • IT as Code
  • Videos/Podcasts
    • DevOps Chats
    • DevOps Unbound
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming
    • On-Demand Webinars
  • Library
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • On-Demand Events
  • Sponsored Communities
    • AWS Community Hub
    • CloudBees
    • IT as Code
    • Rocket on DevOps.com
    • Traceable on DevOps.com
    • Quali on DevOps.com
  • Related Sites
    • Techstrong Group
    • Container Journal
    • Security Boulevard
    • Techstrong Research
    • DevOps Chat
    • DevOps Dozen
    • DevOps TV
    • Digital Anarchist
  • Media Kit
  • About
  • AI
  • Cloud
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Continuous Testing
  • DevSecOps
  • Leadership Suite
  • Practices
  • ROELBOB
  • Low-Code/No-Code
  • IT as Code
  • More
    • Application Performance Management/Monitoring
    • Culture
    • Enterprise DevOps

Home » Blogs » Case Study: DevOps Key to AWS Cloud Migration

Case Study: DevOps Key to AWS Cloud Migration

By: Stephen Withers on November 3, 2017 1 Comment

DevOps practices halved the time it took this SaaS company to migrate to AWS

Recent Posts By Stephen Withers
  • API Security by Design
  • Consider Telemetry When Rearchitecting Applications
  • How To Address DevSecOps Skills Shortages
More from Stephen Withers
Related Posts
  • Case Study: DevOps Key to AWS Cloud Migration
  • How to Design DevSecOps Compliance Processes to Free Up Developer Resources
  • Making DevOps Smoother
    Related Categories
  • Blogs
  • DevOps in the Cloud
    Related Topics
  • AWS
  • case study
  • cloud migration
  • Co-location
  • communications as a service
  • data center
  • devops
  • Microsoft Azure
  • public cloud
  • vendor lock-in
  • Whispir
Show more
Show less

Australia-based Whispir provides communications applications as a service. One of its goals is to get products into users’ hands as soon as possible, and that requires development, operations and product staff working together, said Jonathan Swift, head of product and operations.

Whispir formerly operated from a co-location data center, a model that continued as it expanded internationally. But the time and effort needed to run the systems was not cost-effective for an organization of its size, so the company switched largely to AWS. Governance issues faced by some clients force the company to still run its own systems in certain geographical locations.

DevOps Connect:DevSecOps @ RSAC 2022

In the process, “[We] learned a lot about our app and how to make it cloud-ready,” said Swift. “Cloud isn’t free, cloud isn’t cheap” and is potentially more expensive than placing servers in co-lo data centers if the software isn’t built correctly.

For example, it makes sense to make the most use of a physical server as it is largely a fixed cost. But in the cloud, the fewer resources you use, the less it costs.

Crises Lead to Spikes

On the other hand, a lot of Whispir’s business is crisis-focused (eg, Caltex uses Whispir at its Kurnell oil refinery in Sydney to send emergency messages), and it takes a certain amount of time to spin up additional instances to deal with spikes in message volumes. “That was a real challenge,” said Swift.

Those crisis-communications clients expect Whispir to have sufficient resources to meet sudden demand. That’s an expensive proposition with co-located hardware, whereas Ccloud resources can be scaled up quickly, though not instantaneously.

Seasonality has to be taken into account. One relatively predictable driver of crisis messaging is Australia’s bushfire season. Unfortunately, this overlaps Christmas, which is a peak time for marketing messages. So Whispir plans to run at around 200 percent of its normal baseline capacity during the fire season. This is easily done with cloud infrastructure, which Swift describes as “a beautiful thing” in this context.

Some organizations are scared by multi-tenant environments. The ability to stand up dedicated instances on AWS is a great feature that Whispir can offer, especially to its clients in the financial sector.

The company’s DevOps practices had been focused on the co-location environment, so even though kanban still “works very well for us” after moving to AWS, some previous choices had to be revisited. In particular, new monitoring tools were needed to cope with the elasticity inherent in the cloud and because the focus expanded from the hardware to the whole stack.

Selected tools included the Zabbix open-source monitoring platform and Sumo Logic for trend analysis.

Earlier this year, Whispir moved all of its Australian customers into a “pure AWS” environment. There are some great tools for migration, Swift said, “but it’s not as straightforward or seamless as you might think.” He recommends doubling any initial estimate of the time required for such projects.

There were some nasty surprises: The first month’s bill from AWS was “huge” and it took a couple of months to determine the cause, even with the aid of AWS’s “really beneficial” premium support service.

Security requirements in various jurisdictions had to be taken into consideration, with updates to various procedures to ensure the new cloud environment was compliant. For instance, the procedures required when a physical system was decommissioned were well-understood, but how could they be translated into a cloud environment? One specific example is that an in-house storage device can be destroyed when it reaches the end of its life, but in the cloud it’s largely a matter of relying on the provider’s controls.

Avoid Lock-In

But Swift warned that “the challenge is to not lock yourself in” to a particular cloud provider. For Whispir, which operates a mixed cloud/on-premises environment (no cloud provider offers the right onshore facilities in New Zealand and the hardware that Whispir has installed in Singapore is too new to be replaced by IaaS), that is a requirement rather than a strategic choice.

Whispir would have avoided AWS-specific features that would make the platform easier to use and more difficult to get out of, despite the fact that using provider-specific toolsets can yield significant cost savings.

Whispir is keeping an eye on Azure—”great tools, great partnerships, great ecosystems,” observed Swift—and may migrate to Microsoft’s cloud in around 18 months.

A particular advantage is that Azure Stack can be run on private hardware, which could be useful if Whispir decided to enter a market where Microsoft Azure wasn’t present.

Either way, the intention is to go 100 percent cloud to the extent that is possible.

‘Infrastructure as Code’ Means More Power for Ops

The move to the cloud has made Whispir’s operations people more powerful, he observed. The infrastructure-as-code concept allows for rapid deployment, enables operations to contribute more to product development, reduces risk and enables the company to be more responsive to the market.

Furthermore, dealing with on-premises hardware still very much a waterfall situation, thanks to the delays and dependencies involved. But moving to IaaS means infrastructure issues sit comfortably within the kanban model.

IaaS also means that various network-related tasks simply disappear, but other issues arise in their place. For example, some external services used by Whispir (eg, SMS gateways) require the use of VPN connections from a known IP address, but with cloud infrastructure the best you may be able to do is specify a range of addresses. Whispir’s short-term fix was to route such connections through a specific server in the co-lo center, and in the longer term it found providers with less-restrictive arrangements.

Moving from co-lo to cloud would have been “incredibly hard” without DevOps, Swift said. It would have taken at least twice as long, he noted, and the company wouldn’t be able to run the mixed environment as well as it does.

“There’s no way we would have been so successful” without DevOps, he said.

— Stephen Withers

Filed Under: Blogs, DevOps in the Cloud Tagged With: AWS, case study, cloud migration, Co-location, communications as a service, data center, devops, Microsoft Azure, public cloud, vendor lock-in, Whispir

Sponsored Content
Featured eBook
The Automated Enterprise

The Automated Enterprise

“The Automated Enterprise” e-book shows the important role IT automation plays in business today. Optimize resources and speed development with Red Hat® management solutions, powered by Red Hat Ansible® Automation. IT automation helps your business better serve your customers, so you can be successful as you: Optimize resources by automating ... Read More
« IBM Adds Cloud Foundry PaaS to Cloud Private
Capital Formation »

TechStrong TV – Live

Click full-screen to enable volume control
Watch latest episodes and shows

Upcoming Webinars

Deploying Microservices With Pulumi & AWS Lambda
Tuesday, June 28, 2022 - 3:00 pm EDT
Boost Your Java/JavaScript Skills With a Multi-Experience Platform
Wednesday, June 29, 2022 - 3:30 pm EDT
Closing the Gap: Reducing Enterprise AppSec Risks Without Disrupting Deadlines
Thursday, June 30, 2022 - 11:00 am EDT

Latest from DevOps.com

Developer’s Guide to Web Application Security
June 24, 2022 | Anas Baig
Cloudflare Outage Outrage | Yet More FAA 5G Stupidity
June 23, 2022 | Richi Jennings
The Age of Software Supply Chain Disruption
June 23, 2022 | Bill Doerrfeld
Four Steps to Avoiding a Cloud Cost Incident
June 22, 2022 | Asim Razzaq
At Some Point, We’ve Shifted Too Far Left
June 22, 2022 | Don Macvittie

Get The Top Stories of the Week

  • View DevOps.com Privacy Policy
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Download Free eBook

The Automated Enterprise
The Automated Enterprise

Most Read on DevOps.com

Four Steps to Avoiding a Cloud Cost Incident
June 22, 2022 | Asim Razzaq
How FinOps Can Optimize Cloud Costs and Drive Innovation
June 21, 2022 | Larry Cusick
Survey Uncovers Depth of Open Source Software Insecurity
June 21, 2022 | Mike Vizard
One Year Out: What Biden’s EO Means for Software Devs
June 20, 2022 | Tim Mackey
The Age of Software Supply Chain Disruption
June 23, 2022 | Bill Doerrfeld

On-Demand Webinars

DevOps.com Webinar ReplaysDevOps.com Webinar Replays
  • Home
  • About DevOps.com
  • Meet our Authors
  • Write for DevOps.com
  • Media Kit
  • Sponsor Info
  • Copyright
  • TOS
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Techstrong Group, Inc.

© 2022 ·Techstrong Group, Inc.All rights reserved.