A leading International Organization Transforms its Business by Switching from AWS to Azure

Client Overview:

The client is an international organization specializing in web development, online marketing and open source hosting based in United States.

Description:

The client was exclusively on Amazon Web Services for the past few years, but with their global expansion plans, they needed a multi-cloud strategy that could better meet their business needs. While on the AWS Cloud, the company experienced several business challenges, including no high availability for customers in many regions. Not only did this make it difficult for the client to meet their customers’ increasing demands, but they were also forced to hire additional labor resources to ensure everything was up and running. The result was a huge increase in operational costs and lack of efficiency. SNP collaborated with the client to help them migrate 70% of their customers to Azure from regions that were currently not served or were underserved by AWS.

The Solution: Application Modernization with Managed Kubernetes on Azure

The client was running and managing its hosting service in an OpenShift Container Platform on VM clusters on AWS. With SNP’s support, the client validated that it could host their service in a Redhat OpenShift Container Platform on Azure. Utilizing Go-Fast funding and SNP’s internal resources, SNP helped the client migrate clusters from OpenShift on AWS to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

To get the client production ready, SNP leveraged multiple technologies such as the OpenShift Container Platform on Azure, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) platform, Helm Integration, Azure Governance, Network Configuration, Azure Security Center and Azure Monitor, and Infrastructure-as-a-Code using ARM templates and Terraform.

During and after the migration process it became clear to client the transformative impact SNP was delivering their business. The CTO, stated

“We really like the support we're getting from SNP on our migration to Azure. SNP understands what their customers need and has become our go-to partner for open source. They provided our teams with extensive training on Azure and got us up and running with managed Kubernetes in Azure. SNP is extensively involved with Microsoft open source, especially contributing actively to our OpenSource Hosting Solution, Lagoon. SNP knows the Microsoft Technology stack inside and out, and they know how to help their customers.”

The Results:

The client has seen significant improvement in the speed and efficiency of its IT service delivery. The company automated repetitive management processes and streamlined storage provisioning using the OpenShift Container Platform on Azure. Some of the most significant improvements the client has experienced include:

• Transitioning to Azure to accommodate rapid global growth in customers and data.
• The client’s infrastructure management time has been reduced by 80% with managed support from SNP.
• The client has seen a drastic reduction in the cost of maintaining their infrastructure now that they don't need to run master nodes anymore.
• In the future, the client is looking to offer its digital conversion and hosting services in countries like Switzerland where AWS currently has no presence, unlike Azure.
• In the next two years, the client is looking to fully support its AKS environment with Lagoon, their proprietary product.

The client is also planning to add more features to its Lagoon application and expand to support other content management systems (e.g., WordPress, Laravel, Symfony) with support from SNP.