Renova Cloud reviewed the customer’s requirements and the current system to gain an overall understanding. The following main topics were identified as of importance to meet the needs of the customer and all stakeholders:

• The application workloads must be deployed in virtual servers and load-balanced with optional auto-scaling, using auto-healing features as appropriate
• Stability and adequate performance of the applications is extremely important, due to possibility of losing users and business as result of any low performance or downtime
• There should be multiple environments for production and non-production workloads with a proper separation between them; however avoiding over-engineered solution
• Data stores, cache, search, message queue, etc. should be offered as AWS managed service where this is possible
• Private connectivity from SmartPay premises required; both Direct Connect and VPN
• High Availability configuration for applications and data stores is important and should be achieved in Multi-AZ basis to withstand the failure of an AZ
• Cost-effectiveness: it’s important to eliminate waste and identify the necessary and superfluous parts; so the solution must contain only the necessary services

Based on these high level requirements and detailed discussion with the customer’s business, technical and developers regarding the sizing and usage patterns, Renova Cloud drafted a solution on AWS. The migration plan was divided into 2 phases, first Re-host approach with lift-and-shift of all relevant workloads, second phase migrating the required services such as databases, message queues, caching, search to AWS managed services. Renova Cloud as AWS partner performed the migration tasks for the both phases.

1. Re-host migration phase took place for all the in-scope servers and was performed mainly using the AWS CloudEndure Migration tool with agents installed in the old servers and using the agents to replicate to the new EC2 instances on AWS. For the relational databases within the solution, the AWS RDS service was used as the hosting migration target, and AWS DMS Database Migration Service successfully migrating the whole database directly to the AWS RDS database servers.
2. Re-platform migration phase involved identifying each workload that could be running well in an AWS managed service, there are several used as target in this phase; the NoSQL database MongoDB was migrated to AWS DocumentDB, Redis was migrated to ElastiCache for Redis, while RabbitMQ message queues were refactored in AmazonMQ topics and Elasticsearch was run with Amazon Elasticsearch.

Both phases were managed as independent projects with clear planning, designing, implementation, testing and delivery phases defined. The customer and their feedback were involved at each step.

The secure private connectivity to the AWS VPC is managed through two different managed VPN solutions. Between customer’s premises and AWS, a Site-to-Site VPN connection with a pair of tunnels is established, allowing connectivity of SmartPay users to their required interfaces. The AWS networking partner also supported to request the Direct Connect setup for faster dedicated connectivity, enabling fast transactions in the app.

The first phase architecture describes the lift-and-shift migration with CloudEndure: