About Our Client

The client pioneered the online marketplace concept in 1998 when a group of procurement professionals in Florida decided that the best way to reach more qualified suppliers was to aggregate their lists so that everyone could get the best products at the best rates. Since then, they’ve expanded their reach to state and local governments nationwide and continue to connect suppliers with government agencies at a record pace.

Challenge

All the web apps and API services were hosted in VMs. And documents uploaded by customers were being stored in a local file system. SQL databases and their jobs resided in VM. An automatic database backup should happen at specific intervals and be restored to another server for reporting purposes. The following challenges were to be addressed by cloud migration:

• System should be scalable without any limitations and should able to handle both data and system scalability
• Increase the robustness of the system
• Increase the availability of the system
• Have an automated data and application backup and restore plan
• Make the system secure by having network and application monitoring decouple entirely from the system
• Map the system to UTC so that business can grow across the globe rather than US specific time zones
• Improved instrumentation and logging for better tracking, debugging issue resolution and understanding customer patterns.
• Make deployment and maintenance easier so that fewer overheads are needed for infrastructure monitoring

Solution

Considering the above requirements, analyzed the various solutions and strategies in terms of hosting, performance, security, SQL data & jobs, and pricing, the following activities are performed:

• Migrated all the existing Web Apps to render from Azure CDN
• Migrated all API app services to microservice-based App Services using Docker containers
• Moved documents from VM based file system storage to Storage Accounts
• Migrated SQL Server to Azure SQL with Elastic pool and converted the entire data framework to work with Azure SQL and also migrated all time zone handling to UTC
• Database Jobs and Backup & Restore converted to Elastic Jobs and Azure Automation
• Implemented Redis Cache to improve application performance, availability, resiliency, and robustn
• Implemented security using Application Gateway, Authentication, Firewall rules at Azure SQL and also using private vNet integration
• Implemented “Alerts & Monitoring” on various systems, data, and application metrics
• Implemented instrumentation and analytics using App Insights, Google Analytics, and Amplitude
• Enabled smoother and automatic build and deployment using pipelines, CI & CD

Outcomes

• Integration and utilization of modern Cloud Services
• Reduced cost
• Scalability and Security
• Governance and Monitoring
• Legacy Application Transformation
• Modern UI Framework
• Migration of COM Components to Microservices
• Data sync and migration across two applications