Migration of Environments funded by funds raised through the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP)

The customer whose case we describe in the following text is a Polish software house that focuses primarily on implementing solutions related to the international logistics industry. One of the applications developed and operated by the customer has made it possible, among other things, to handle several million shipments between Asia and Europe. Softwarehouse is also active in e-commerce, implementing CRM systems and mobile applications. Together with the customer, we are going through a migration process to the cloud supported by AWS MAP (Migration Acceleration Program), which finances a significant part of the migration costs and offers reimbursement in credits as discounts for resources on AWS.

Start of collaboration and MAP

We have worked with the client on selected projects for over 5 years. The diversity of the clients served by Softwarehouse meant that the applications and software developed for the clients became increasingly dispersed over time across several environments hosted by several Vendors. Along with the company's growth, the influx of new orders, and the dynamic scaling of the currently maintained applications, this type of dispersion was becoming a cumbersome solution, which did not allow the business's full potential to be used.

At this point, the client began to look for opportunities to migrate all environments to a single location, where modern infrastructures would be created that would allow for dynamic scaling, adapted to the changing needs, without requiring a great deal of in-house work (the client's main objective was to cut out infrastructure issues as much as possible and focus on working on applications).

At one of the meetings, the customer representative shared with us his desire to reorganize the structure of his environments, so we started the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) together.

AWS MAP is a migration program designed for customers in Poland to help them migrate their first environments to AWS—organizationally, technically, and financially.

The Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) is divided into three stages:

1. Assess, in which AWS can fund Hostersi's work to prepare you for migration—workshops, evaluation of environments that are worth migrating to the cloud, creation of a Project Plan, Migration Readiness Assessment (a workshop analyzing readiness for migration and determining areas that still need to be addressed), and assistance in evaluating security or compliance requirements. We agree on the scope of work together with the customer.
2. Mobilize, in which we can finance 50% of Hostersi's work related to preparing the Landing Zone, planning the migration, training employees, and conducting the first migrations to the cloud.
3. Migrate & Modernize—At this stage, we offer cost reductions through credits for the AWS services used. For newly migrated environments, we reimburse between 20 and 50% of the first year's cost—the amount of reimbursement depends on the type of final services selected in AWS.

Start of MAP procedures - assessment phase.

The process's first phase primarily verifies the company's readiness to migrate to the AWS cloud from a technological and business perspective. This is a phase in which there is no cost to the customer and is carried out by Hostersi staff. It is also the time when, together with the customer's representatives, we analyze the current costs of the infrastructure and its maintenance, forecast how much the environment will cost after migration to AWS, discuss additional possibilities, and write down the needs identified by the customer. In the case of the customer whose case we are describing, the implementation of this stage took us approximately 3 months, and the result of our work was the ‘migration readiness’ report (Assess Analysis Report), which includes, among other things, our suggested optimal plan for the migration of resources to the AWS cloud.

Stage 2 - mobilise phase

Once the ‘readiness report’ for migration had been discussed and accepted by the decision-makers on the client side, we began the process of ‘paving the way’ for the actual migration. At this stage, in cooperation with our Solution Architect, a precise migration plan was developed together with a diagram of the environments built for the transferred applications. At this stage, we also carried out the so-called ‘pilot migration’, the idea of which was to select the potentially most complex environment that would cause the most problems during the migration.

Thanks to the efficient implementation of the ‘pilot’, we reassured the Customer that migrating the remaining resources would not cause unexpected problems and that the entire process could be carried out smoothly and on schedule.

Phase 3 - Migrate & Modernize

We are about to start the phase of the gradual migration of the AWS Customer environments. We will be able to share its results in a few months.

MAP from a technical perspective

The entire planning and implementation phase for all technical aspects of the MAP migration lay with our Solution Architects and DevOps. They will also be responsible for migrating and maintaining the customer's subsequent environments in the following steps. It is worth mentioning that one of the objectives of MAP is to create infrastructures that, in all respects, will refer to the best, applied practices with particular emphasis on the security aspect (Least privilege, IAM roles, Single sing on), which in the case of applications supplied by the Software house is also of considerable importance.

Summary

Together with the client, we are implementing the migration process using funds awarded by Amazon Web Services as part of the Migration Acceleration Program. The possible funding reaches $60,000. We have now passed the first two phases of the program together and completed the pilot migration, thus starting phase 3—the actual migration of the environments indicated by the Customer.

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