Saving money, increasing security and fixing reliability: Public to Private Cloud Migration Case Study
Objective: Reduce Public Cloud costs while maintaining the same functionality and availability, with no or minimal changes to application code.
Timeline: March 2024 - Oct 2024
Previous AWS Cloud Bill: <1 million GBP per month
Private Cloud Bill: 200,000 GBP Per Month
Upfront Cost (Amortised Over 5 years): 2 million, ~35,000 per month
Total Savings: Upwards of 750,000 GBP per month!
Cloud providers have been increasing costs across the board while failing to maintain reliability and security as demonstrated in recent AWS and GCP outages (add links).
This has led to a growing trend of migrating some or all workloads onto managed private clouds from providers such as install.tech to achieve cost savings, predictable, trackable budgets and stability.
One of our many success stories lies with an I-Gaming SaaS provider. The Client was previously running all workloads in AWS. Their application is composed of a typical modern stack of Java, NodeJS and Python microservices, utilising AWS native managed services such as MSK, SSM, S3 and RDS.
Throughout 2024, the customer was facing recurring issues with throughput and latency during peak events - football matches, horse races and other such situations where unpredictable numbers of users would flock to the sites to place bets. This situation on the surface level seems perfect for the Public cloud; the customer thought that auto-scaling would yield cost savings and performance benefits.
However, they quickly discovered that AWS scaled too slowly and inconsistently, leading to ineffective execution and ballooning costs, culminating in a 50 account AWS bill totalling over 1 million GBP monthly.
In March 2024, the Client approached install.tech to implement a solution that would save costs while maintaining reliability and alleviating performance bottlenecks. In partnership with VMware, HPE, Cisco, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, and Stellanor, we designed and implemented a Private Cloud on-prem hosted solution.
Using the VMware Cloud Foundation suite, EKS Anywhere Kubernetes implementation, Strimiz Kafka, MiniIO Object Storage, MetalLB Kubernetes Load Balancer, Postgres and Clickhouse DBs solution deployed on HPE server nodes and Cisco networking stack. The system hosted in Stellanor DC, located in North Central London, took about 3 months to completeBy June 2024 Install.tech delivered, racked, patched, and configured the required hardware and storage and networking infrastructure. VMware Platform and EKS Anywhere were deployed, followed by Kubernetes cluster setup and FluxCD-driven application installation. Private Links were set up for secure communication with AWS Cloud, allowing the customer to maintain a hybrid deployment approach for maximum flexibility, directing each workload automatically as appropriate.Remote access was secured using the Cloudflare One platform and CrowdStrike Falcon Complete for infrastructure security. Observability stack provided by Grafana and Prometheus solutions. All the infrastructure deployments and management are fully automated (IaC) using Terraform. All the code resides in a private GitHub repository, and the platform is following the GitOps methodology. Config changes are version-controlled, reviewed and approved by the strict PR approval process. All the application's CI/CD pipelines could be reused, with almost no modification.
By October 2024, the migration had been completed and 40 AWS workloads were running on prem.
Install.tech is responsible for monitoring all platform layers 24/7, from hardware health to the VMware solution to Kubernetes cluster health, using Grafana Dashboards, Alerts Manager for automated alerting, as well as Incident.io handling the incident management process. Security events are logged, monitored and alerted by CrowdStrike Next-Gen SIEM. We provide white-glove, direct support for the entire implementation, matching and exceeding the managed services provided by AWS.
The project was a major success, culminating in net monthly savings nearing 800,000 GBP monthly. The migration was seamless, with our engineers ensuring minimal downtime was needed to cut over between the two sites.
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Interested in how much you could save with a similar move?
