Enhancing Business Agility: A Cloud Migration Success Story for a Multimedia Platform

In today’s business world, agility, scalability, and performance are more important than ever. Many organizations face the challenge of managing rapid growth while ensuring high uptime and operational flexibility. Initially deployed on-premises using Docker Swarm, this infrastructure required a more scalable solution to meet the demands of an expanding user base. We encountered similar challenges with one of our clients, who operates a multimedia interoperability platform.

The existing user base needs a solution that can effectively manage their growth and deliver high performance as they grow and demand more uptime and flexibility.

Problem Statement

The existing infra running on-premise Docker Swarm shows signs of stress as the feature set and user base increase rapidly over time. The Performance limitations, hardware constraints, and the increasing complexity of managing containers at scale presented significant challenges.

As an organization grows, managing over 50+ micro-services on multiple environments across the infrastructure started to create significant challenges:

• Management Complexity: Managing over 50+ applications using Docker Swarm was tough to handle. The orchestration complexity and monitoring of the containers increase with the number of applications and features, resulting in inefficiencies and potential downtime.
• Hardware Limitations: The on-premises infrastructure was bound by hardware constraints. Here scaling requires costly hardware, and provisioning resources for peak hours leads to financial and operational inefficiency.
• Performance Issues: Due to high demand, infrastructure faces performance bottlenecks. Ensuring high availability for critical applications becomes difficult, especially as the workload increases beyond the capacity of the currently running infrastructure.
• Maintenance Overhead: Constantly managing the underlying hardware and updating the Docker Swarm environment, increases the operational cost and distracts from core business initiatives.

Achieving faster deployment and maintaining high availability of the existing infrastructure poses a challenge that’s why we were looking for a solution that should be more robust and scalable to meet their needs while minimizing downtime and operational overhead.

Business Solution

These challenges were successfully handled through a smooth transition from an on-premises Docker Swarm to AWS-managed EKS, where Kubernetes helps us to manage the containers on a large scale. Kubernetes automated scaling, management, and seamless deployment help to uphold operational efficiency during the cloud migration process.

Migration Solutions

Choosing a suitable orchestration tool is also a challenging task. We evaluated various solutions, e.g.: AWS ECS, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes, and after conducting a thorough analysis, they ended up with AWS EKS Kubernetes for their infrastructure migration. Below are evaluation descriptions of the few orchestration tools:

• AWS ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service, suitable for smaller-scale operations. The lack of flexibility and multi-cloud support made it less than ideal for meeting our long-term scalability requirements.
• AWS EKS (Kubernetes) is prioritized over other orchestration tools due to its multi-cloud support, scalability, and strong open-source community support. It allowed us to maintain control over its infrastructure, automate deployment processes, and scale operations as needed. Its adaptability enables quick innovation while managing operational complexity effectively.

Why choose AWS EKS?

Due to its managed service feature, multi-region, and multi-cloud deployments support and allow you to run your applications across multiple AWS regions or even on other cloud service providers EKS is prioritized over other Orchestration tools.

Scalability, reliability, availability of AWS infrastructure, and integrations with AWS networking and security services were essential requirements and these requirements were fulfilled by AWS EKS as a managed cloud service. These features allowed them to expand without the burden of managing infrastructure complexities.

• Managed Service: EKS automatically manages the availability & scalability of the Kubernetes control plane nodes responsible for scheduling containers, managing cluster and application availability, storing cluster data, and other key tasks, allowing developers to focus on delivering values to their clients rather than managing infrastructure which reduces the operational costs.
• Security: AWS EKS uses AWS integrated features, e.g.: AWS IAM which ensures maintenance of strict control over access to their cloud environment, adhering to high-security standards.
• Cost Efficiency: Operating on a pay-as-you-go model, making it a cost-effective solution. They could scale their infrastructure whenever required without incurring the high upfront costs associated with on-premises hardware.
• Global Reach: AWS’s multi-region availability allowed us to deploy services in multiple regions, enhancing the availability and resilience of their applications.

Business-related advantages of Migration

1. Scalability

As a growing user base, they need a dynamic infra that can be scaled whenever required. AWS EKS allowed them to auto-scale their application based on real-time demand, ensuring that the services remained performant with minimal manual intervention or costly hardware upgrades.

2. Operational Efficiency

EKS operational overhead is drastically reduced concerning on-premises infra. As AWS EKS manages the control plane, helps the teams focus more on core business objectives rather than spending time and resources on maintaining the complex infrastructure.

3. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

AWS’s global infrastructure provides enhanced disaster recovery options. In case of a failure, their applications could be quickly redeployed in other regions, with minimal downtime & uninterrupted access to application services.

4. Cost Reduction

Using the AWS Pay-as-you-go pricing model provided by AWS EKS, we moved away from costly infrastructure expenditures associated with on-premises hardware.

5. Rapid Innovation

By removing complex infrastructure constraints, the development teams focus on developing new features rather than managing, maintaining, & upgrading the existing infrastructure which led us to faster product development cycles, & allowed frequent release of new features and services.

During migration, we started with a PoC and had some specific requirements, which gave various pros and cons. Below is a detailed analysis of the pros and challenges we faced during migration:

Pros:

1. Scalability: AWS EKS allows dynamic scaling of your applications across multiple nodes. It can automatically provision new resources as the demand spikes. It saves money when demand subsides without manual intervention.

2. Managed Control Plane: AWS EKS manages container scheduling & application availability, stores cluster data, and other key activities. Due to its high availability, it reduces the overhead of managing the cluster manually.
No Master Node Management: In Docker Swarm, we have to take care of the Docker Swarm master nodes, while EKS abstracts control plane management, making deployment smoother.

3. Enhanced Security:

• AWS Native Security: AWS provides support for its native security services like AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to secure the entire infrastructure in the same place. IAM roles for service accounts enhance fine-grained security control over Kubernetes pods.
• Isolation & Compliance: AWS offers options for compliance with various regulatory frameworks (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA) and features like VPC isolation, enabling better segmentation and security for workloads.

4. Flexibility:

• Kubernetes Ecosystem: Kubernetes offers more advanced orchestration capabilities than Docker Swarm, such as more granular control over workloads, networking, and persistent storage. You can also use Helm charts, Operators, and CRDs (Custom Resource Definitions) to extend Kubernetes’ capabilities.
• Multi-Cloud or Hybrid Deployments: Kubernetes’ popularity makes it easier to deploy applications in multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments compared to Docker Swarm.

5. CI/CD Integration:

• AWS DevOps Integration: EKS integrates easily with DevOps tools like AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeDeploy, Jenkins, and GitLab for CI/CD.
• Kubernetes Tools: Using Kubernetes, we can follow multiple deployment strategies like rolling updates, blue-green deployments, and canary releases, which helps us in safer upgrades with minimal downtime.

6. High Availability and Reliability:

• AWS Infrastructure: Due to its high availability and fault tolerance across multiple availability zones (AZs), EKS can distribute nodes across different AZs, ensuring the cluster is resilient to failures in a single AZ.
• Self-Healing: The self-healing mechanism of Kubernetes ensures that failed pods and nodes are automatically restarted or rescheduled, minimizing service disruption.

7. Access to AWS Services:

• Seamless Integration: Migrating to AWS EKS, gains easy access to other AWS services e.g.: RDS, S3, CloudWatch, and Lambda, enabling richer application ecosystems.
• Native Monitoring and Logging: Built-in tools like CloudWatch & CloudTrail, allow centralized observability for both Kubernetes resources & the broader infrastructure.

Migration Challenges

• Data and Network Migration: Migrating stateful applications and data from on-premise to AWS can be challenging. Ensuring data consistency, setting up new network configurations, and transferring large datasets can introduce downtime or operational complexity.
• Downtime and Rollback Risks: During migration, unexpected issues arise, such as compatibility problems between Docker Swarm and Kubernetes configurations. In that case, we have to make changes in our approach accordingly. Additionally, we have to prepare a rollback plan that helps us in case of infra failures.

Conclusion

It’s a business strategic move to migrate from an on-premises Docker Swarm to AWS EKS container, taking advantage of the cloud’s scalability, security, & cost-effectiveness.

These infra changes have enabled us to continue providing secure, interoperable communication solutions to their rapidly increasing client base, with the confidence that their infrastructure is prepared for future demands. For any organization planning to scale effectively with minimal operational complexity, AWS EKS(Kubernetes) has a proven pathway to success, just as they have for us.