Successful migration of all international datacenters to AWS and reduced overall cloud spend
Complete application and dependency mapping to ensure performance during migration
Performance benchmarking delivers consistent post-migration service delivery
The Beginning
A Fortune 500 retail company embarked on an ambitious migration to AWS for greater elasticity and scalability.
A Fortune 500 retail company operates a global network of brands that include gaming and mobile labels.
Across these properties, the retailer operates over 5,000 retail locations in more than a dozen countries. Supporting this large and distributed operation is an IT team of 400 people, who are responsible for everything from the company's global datacenters to the e-commerce and point-of-sale systems on which the retailer runs its business.
Over the past few years, the retailer has embarked on an ambitious migration to AWS. By the end of 2016, all of the company's international datacenters had been migrated to the AWS cloud, and the company was in the process of migrating the first U.S. datacenter as well. By 2018, the IT team at retailer plans to have migrated all worldwide on-premises infrastructure to AWS.
"Our core competency is retail. We're not an IT systems builder. We need to focus on supporting the core business objective," said the retailer's manager for performance and automation. "With a datacenter, you have to over-provision everything and approvals for budget expenditures can cause delays. The cloud gives us much better speed to market, providing the elasticity and scale we need to rapidly meet business demand."
With ExtraHop, we can intelligently and deliberately plan the capacity we need, minimizing our spend. That helps us deliver faster application performance and better end-user experience while keeping our costs down.
Performance and Automation Manager
,
Fortune 500 Retail Company
The Outcome
ExtraHop delivered automated, contextual visibility across the service delivery chain, ensuring security and performance.
ExtraHop has played a key role in supporting the migration to AWS.
Cloud Spend Planning
On an average day, the retailer estimates that it processes approximately eight orders (or sales) per second. But on major retail days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, that number explodes, with orders often hitting as many as 45 per second. With ExtraHop, the retailer's IT team is able to monitor these transactions in real-time as they happen.
"One of the amazing things with ExtraHop is that IT is now the first to know how sales are going on a given day. We can tell the business in real-time how sales compare year-over-year," said the manager.
But that's not the only benefit. With ExtraHop, the retailer's IT team has also established capacity benchmarks for high-traffic retail days.
"We're moving to AWS because the scale and capacity it affords us. With ExtraHop, we can intelligently and deliberately plan the capacity we need, minimizing our spend. That helps us deliver faster application performance and better end-user experience while keeping our costs down. That's a win-win for our entire business," says the manager.
Application & Dependency Mapping
In order to minimize service and business process disruption during various phases of the migration, the retailer used ExtraHop to provide up-to-the-second mapping of applications and dependencies, and create move groups based on that data. With that information, they were able to minimize service disruptions and keep critical business applications and infrastructure up and running during the migration process.
Performance Benchmarking
Pre-migration, the retailer used ExtraHop to proactively monitor and manage infrastructure performance across the entire application stack. As part of that monitoring, they established performance benchmarks that are now being used as baselines for tracking performance of the same application and infrastructure components in AWS. This helps to ensure that applications are performing at or better than the level they were in the datacenter, improving end-user experience and business performance.