A large research and development component lacked durable, reliable access to numerous applications serving a variety of users in distributed locations. At the same time, the component was expected to reach a corporate metric that included a massive decommission of physical hardware and closure of internal data centers.
LTI built a solution on Amazon Web Services that provides fully automated continuous delivery capability to control, provision, and deployed the applications and the associated Amazon Web Services infrastructure and services consumed.
The cloud migration project began by analyzing existing applications for cloud readiness, meeting with application owners to review functional and technical requirements, documenting interfaces, and identifying risks. During this information gathering phase, the team also designed a secure network infrastructure that allows for seamless integration with Amazon Web Services resources from behind the firewall. Whenever possible, the team took advantage of opportunities to refactor applications to leverage Amazon Web Services for optimal performance and high availability. The application code was maintained in a version control repository; using an “infrastructure as code” approach, the team resources added the scripts and configuration files that were used to build the cloud environment for each application in the repository. Since the full stack was entirely specified in this revision control system, the team was able to develop a fully automated continuous delivery pipeline. With the click of a button, we were able to create an application’s environment on Amazon Web Services, configure it to meet the application’s needs, then build and deploy the application in a repeatable fashion, eliminating manual processes that would otherwise be error-prone and time-consuming. When the team started the project, there was no existing cloud environment, no pipeline, and no roadmap in place; utilizing this method, the team migrated more than 150 applications over a one year period with minimal disruption to the client.
LTI Subject Matter Experts built an application migration platform that is flexible, robust and scalable. The solution ensures that the population of several thousand users located across the globe has immediate access to version correct applications. This is particularly important in situations where simulation and modeling applications are interconnected. Simultaneously, the component satisfied their physical hardware decommission metric by utilizing a cloud environment for compute capacity, web hosting and data storage.
