Migration to cloud

Customer: A leading provider of cloud-based software solutions

Problem Statement
Being a part of the highly regulated life sciences industry, recognized the benefits of
cloud a long time ago. The Customer were one of the very first life sciences solution
vendors to deliver SaaS solutions to its customers. Currently, that momentum
continues as the business goes “all-in on AWS” by moving their entire cloud
infrastructure to the AWS platform.
As their platform and solutions are powered entirely by the AWS cloud, the business
wanted to find ways to reduce costs, strengthen security and increase the
availability of the existing AWS environment. Powerup’s services were enlisted with
the following objectives:
1. Cost optimization of the existing AWS environment
2. Deployment automation of
3. Safety infrastructure on AWS
4. Architecture and deployment of centralized Log Management solution
5. Architecture review and migration of the client’s customer environment to
AWS including POC for Database Migration Service (DMS)
6. Evaluation of DevOps strategy

Proposed Solution
1. Cost optimization of the existing AWS environment
Here are the three steps followed by Powerup to optimize costs:
 Addressing idle resources by proper server tagging, translating into instant
savings
 Right sizing recommendation for instances after a proper data analysis
 Planning Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RI) purchasing for resized EC2
instances to capture long-term savings
Removing idle/unused resource clutter would fail to achieve its desired objective in
the absence of a proper tagging strategy. Tags created to address wasted resources
also help to properly size resources by improving capacity and usage analysis. After
right sizing, committing to reserved instances gets a lot easier. For example,
Powerup team was able to draw a comparison price chart for the running EC2 & RDS
instances based on the On-Demand Vs RI costs and share a detailed analysis
explaining the RI Instances pricing plans.
By following these steps, Powerup estimated 30% reduction in monthly spend of
the customer on AWS.
2. Deployment automation Safety infrastructure on AWS
In AWS, the client has leveraged key security features like Cloud Watch and Cloud
trail to closely monitor the traffic and actions performed at API level. Critical
functions like Identity & Access Management, Encryption, Log management is also
managed by using features of AWS. Capabilities like AWS Guard Duty, which is a ML-
based tool, which continuously monitors threats and add industry intelligence to the
alerts it generates is used by them for 24/7 monitoring; along with AWS Inspector,
which is a vulnerability detection tool. To ensure end to end cyber security, they
have deployed an end to end Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution
called Trend Micro Deep Security. All their products are tested for security
vulnerabilities using IBM AppScan tool and manual code review, following OWASP
Top10 guidelines and NIST standards to ensure Confidentiality, Integrity and
Availability of data.
As part of deployment automation, Powerup used Cloud formation (CF) and/or
Terraform templates to automate infrastructure provision and maintenance. In
addition to this, Powerup’s team simplified all modules used to perform day to day
tasks to render them re-usable for deployments across multiple AWS accounts. Logs
generated for all provisioning tasks were stored in a centralized S3 bucket. The
business had requested for incorporating security parameters and tagging files,
along with tracking of user actions in cloud trail.
3. Architecture and deployment of centralized Log Management solution
Multiple approaches for Log management were shared with the customer. Powerup
and the client team agreed on the approach “AWS CW Event Scheduler/SSM Agent”.
Initially, the scope was generation of Log management system for Safety
infrastructure account, later, it was expanded to other accounts as well. Powerup
team built solution architecture for Log management using ELK stack and Cloud
Watch. Scripts were written such that it can be used across their client’s on AWS
cloud. Separate scripts were written for Linux /Windows machines using Shell
scripting and Powershell. No hard coding was done on the script. All inputs are
through a csv file which would have Instance ID, Log Path, Retention Period, backup
folder path & S3 bucket path.
Furthermore, Live hands-on workshops were conducted by Powerup team to train
the client’s Operations team for future implementations.
4. Architecture review and migration of the client’s environment to AWS including
POC for Database Migration Service (DMS)
The client’s pharmacovigilance software and drug safety platform is now powered
by the AWS Cloud, and currently more than 85 of their 200+ customers have been
migrated, with more to quickly follow. In addition, the wanted Powerup to support
the migration of one of its customer to AWS. Powerup reviewed and validated the
designed architecture. Infrastructure was deployed as per the approved
architecture. Once the architecture was deployed, Powerup used the AWS Well-
Architected Framework to evaluate the deployed architecture and provide guidance
to implement designs that scale with customer’s application needs over time.
Powerup also supported the application team for production Go-live on AWS
infrastructure, along with deploying and testing DMS POC.
5. Evaluation of DevOps strategy
Powerup was responsible for evaluating DevOps automation processes and
technologies to suit the products built by the client’s product engineering team.

Cloud platform
AWS.
Technologies used
EC2, RDS, CloudFormation, S3.

Benefit
Powerup equipped the client with efficient and completely on-demand
infrastructure provisioning with hours, along with built-in redundancies, all
managed by AWS. Eliminating idle and over-allocated capacity, RI management and
continuous monitoring enabled them to optimize costs. They successfully realized
30% savings on overlooked AWS assets, resulting in an overall 10 percent
optimization in AWS cost. In addition, the client can now schedule and automate
application backups, scale up databases in minutes by changing instance type, and
have instances automatically moved to a healthy infrastructure in less than 15
minutes in case of a downtime, giving customers improved resiliency and
availability.
The client continues to provide a globally unified, standardized solution on the AWS
infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform to drive compliance and enhance the
experiences of all its customers.