Migration of DANONE applications and websites to Amazon Web Services

DANONE is a leader in creating value-added products that are offered in categories essential to a healthy diet and address the unique nutritional needs of patients. These include: dairy and plant-based products, water and beverages, and specialty nutrition, such as baby and toddler foods and medical nutrition for the sick.

Introduction

For all DANONE companies in the DACH region, we migrated distributed and non-standardized infrastructures supporting several hundred applications, domains and subdomains to AWS. Our actions led to consolidation of resources, reduction of technology debt, ordering of resource-related costs and significantly accelerated the process of building infrastructures for new projects.

The challenge the client faced was an extremely dispersed infrastructure with many different, independent agencies developing applications written in different languages, using different hosting and software versions. Because of this dispersion, there was a need for greater cost transparency. Another key need was to streamline the process of reporting defects and failures, in much the same way as facilitating the creation of infrastructure for new projects, which in the case of DANONE companies in the DACH region, occur regularly.

Solution

The best solution to the problem, with which the customer approached us, was to migrate all resources to AWS cloud. Due to the very high complexity of the project, resulting primarily from the huge number of domains and their diversity in terms of technology used, we decided that the migration process would be divided into two parts. In the first part, we moved all of the client's resources to isolated shared hosting, while in the second part, we migrated individual groups of domains and applications to AWS EC2. Ultimately, the entire infrastructure is about 50 scalable virtual machines. All of the client's resources are located in one region (Frankfurt), while the Disaster Recovery backups of the entire infrastructure, as requested by the client, are stored in another region within the European Union. After the migration was completed, we also implemented the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) to handle e-mail communication. Then, we prepared a script through which the Customer, in a very short time, can generate a full summary of their current resources (configured domains, instance types, instance names, list of domains per instance, etc.). Thanks to this, among other things, we were able to shorten the time of creating infrastructure for new projects from weeks to hours.

Summary

Migration to AWS, allowed the customer to organize and standardize resources, and to obtain full transparency of costs associated with the maintenance of infrastructure. From a technical point of view, scalability of the new infrastructure proved to be extremely important, because about 40% of websites of all Danone companies in the DACH region are dedicated to periodic marketing campaigns, which directly means that their operation is limited in time and the generated traffic is very irregular. Scalability means that resources can be adapted to current needs in minutes. The simplification of procedures and the introduction of a unified communication system relieved the client's team, as it allowed our team to take over the communication with external software houses responsible for creating applications for our client.

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