Elevating the Future: Seamless Cloud Transformation through QloudX’s Data Migration

Executive Summary

Embark on an inspiring journey with a leading Swedish SaaS provider and QloudX, a renowned cloud solutions expert. Witness their remarkable transformation from traditional on-premises hosting to the dynamic AWS Cloud—a strategic move fueled by the pursuit of modernization, enhanced performance, and unparalleled scalability. Overcoming obstacles that hindered agility and velocity, this migration encompassed an impressive 130 TB of data, including a staggering 56 million objects, seamlessly executed with the power of AWS Snowball. Together, let’s delve into this monumental leap in innovation and technology integration, rewriting the future of business possibilities.

Our Customer

A Swedish high-performance SaaS company, with 20 years of experience in developing and implementing Digital Asset Management solutions for businesses across the globe.
Their Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform is a flexible, cloud-based technology providing businesses with a centralized hub to access, manage and distribute all digital assets.
The company has over 160 clients with over 550,000 users worldwide, who primarily use the service to manage digital material such as pictures, movies, presentations, logos.

The Challenge

A prominent SaaS provider faced substantial challenges with their on-premises server infrastructure, significantly impeding agility, velocity, and scalability. These challenges were accompanied by escalating costs and outdated databases, causing severe performance issues and inefficiencies in their applications. Maintenance of the applications became increasingly burdensome, leading to a decline in the team’s productivity. Eager to overcome these obstacles, the organization set their sights on application modernization, prioritizing a migration to the AWS Cloud.

A major hurdle in this endeavor was the migration of the organization’s vast and complex datasets to the cloud. Handling such large datasets required intricate planning, robust infrastructure, and meticulous execution. Factors such as data volume, compatibility, and data transfer speed presented significant challenges. Ensuring minimal disruption and downtime during the migration process was crucial, given the potential adverse impact on business operations. Moreover, maintaining data integrity, security, and compliance throughout the migration process added an additional layer of complexity.

Migrating large datasets also required careful consideration of network bandwidth limitations, as transferring massive amounts of data over limited connections could result in prolonged migration times. Efficient data synchronization and maintaining data consistency between the source and target systems further complicated the process. Additionally, navigating the complexities of data validation and verification was essential to ensure the accuracy and completeness of migrated datasets.

Overcoming these challenges demanded a comprehensive strategy, robust tools, and expertise in managing large-scale data migrations.

AWS Snowball

Introducing AWS Snowball, a groundbreaking data transfer solution designed to simplify and accelerate large-scale data migrations. As an innovation by Amazon Web Services, Snowball combines cutting-edge technology with practicality. This robust physical device empowers businesses to seamlessly move massive volumes of data from on-premises locations to the secure expanse of the cloud. With its high storage capacity, encryption capabilities, and efficient data transfer mechanisms, AWS Snowball redefines the landscape of data migration, offering a reliable and efficient bridge between existing infrastructure and the cloud’s boundless potential.

The QloudX Solution for Data Migration

QloudX devised a comprehensive data migration strategy in collaboration with the customer, making effective use of AWS Snowball and other pertinent AWS services. Here’s an overview of how QloudX seamlessly tackled the data migration challenges, handling an impressive 130 TB of data comprising a staggering 56 million objects, and facilitated the successful transition:

Leveraging AWS Snowball for Efficient Data (digital assets) Transfer:
AWS Snowball played a central role as the crucial intermediary linking the on-premises data center with the cloud infrastructure. The journey of data commenced with the procurement of two AWS Snowball devices from Amazon Web Services, subsequently delivered to the customer’s data center. The process of ordering AWS Snowballs was streamlined through the creation of a job within the AWS Management Console. These devices arrived preconfigured based on the specifications outlined in the job request, equipped with necessary parameters such as Amazon S3 buckets, AWS Lambda functions, or even Amazon EC2 AMIs if chosen. Once configured, the devices were dispatched to the specified address as per the customer’s preference.
Upon arrival at the customer’s data center, the Snowball devices were loaded with the relevant data, encompassing digital assets sourced from the on-premises infrastructure. Subsequently, the loaded Snowballs were securely transported back to AWS for re-uploading the data to the cloud environment. By harnessing the offline capabilities of the Snowball devices, this data transfer process ensured a seamless transition while effectively mitigating the potential impact on network resources and bandwidth constraints.

Efficient Delta Sync with AWS DataSync:
During the migration of data using AWS Snowball, the old environment remained operational, resulting in continuous generation and storage of new data on-premises. This situation created a disparity between recently generated data and previously uploaded old data in the cloud. To bridge this data gap, QloudX implemented a targeted delta synchronization strategy, leveraging the AWS DataSync service. This intelligent approach focused solely on synchronizing newly created or modified data between the on-premise infrastructure and AWS S3, enhancing the efficiency of data transfer processes and leading to a substantial reduction in the overall migration duration. Consequently, this approach ensured the seamless availability of all data within the cloud environment by the designated Go-live date.

Migrating Relational Database to Aurora PostgreSQL:
QloudX utilized the AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to migrate the customer’s relational database to Aurora PostgreSQL, a fully managed database service offered by AWS known for high scalability, durability, and security. The migration process ensured seamless integration of the database with the AWS Cloud infrastructure, enabling optimal performance and low-latency data access.

Accelerating Asset Downloads:
To enhance asset download speeds for end-users, QloudX employed a CloudFront distribution, a content delivery network (CDN) service provided by AWS. CloudFront offered fast and efficient content delivery with global reach, ensuring that the customer’s digital assets were readily available to users across the globe with improved performance and reduced latency.

Testing and Optimization:
Throughout the data migration process, QloudX conducted extensive testing and optimization to ensure that the solution aligned with the specific requirements of the DAM product and the customer’s needs. This involved thorough performance testing, fine-tuning of infrastructure components, and optimization measures to ensure optimal resource utilization, reliability, and overall system efficiency.

Harnessing the Power of AWS Services

In addition to AWS Snowball, DataSync, DMS and CloudFront, QloudX strategically utilized other AWS services to optimize various facets of the data migration project:
Amazon FSx: QloudX enabled the customer to launch and run highly scalable and durable file systems in the cloud using Amazon FSx. Specifically, FSx for Lustre was utilized, offering high throughput, low latency, and massive scalability. This was particularly beneficial for demanding applications involved in the data migration project.
AWS Key Management Service (KMS): QloudX enabled the customer to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt their data using AWS KMS. This service helped meet their encryption and data protection requirements by providing a secure and scalable key management infrastructure.

Incorporating the capabilities of AWS Snowball and a range of relevant AWS services, the QloudX solution orchestrated an efficient and seamless data migration. By strategically orchestrating the use of these tools, QloudX maximized the efficiency, security, and integrity of the migration process.

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