Overview

Our client’s mission-critical system provides online ordering and delivery of products directly to their clients, on-demand, and 24-hours a day. The application supports over $1.8B in annual revenues and was beginning to fail due to the architecture and physical environment.


Client’s Goals

Our client sells products directly to their clients through brick-and-mortar retail outlets as well as online. The online business for all of Asia was delivered by a single platform on a stand-alone SQL Server environment and demand was steadily increasing. The on-set of COVID and the capability demands that were created were yet to be known.

Project

The cloudEQ team embarked on building a new environment in the cloud while the original platform continued to run the business. The cloudEQ team created six unique environments, one for each country in Asia, on AWS creating a new multi-tiered application using .net and SQL servers. The cloudEQ team took a parallel build approach, and once the new environment was up and running, they performed a country-by-country cutover, taking two months to complete seamlessly. Fortunately, the migration to the cloud project had started in 2019, before the highly rapid growth requirements.

Solution

  • Six environments created, one for each country and each with its own application/DB instance
  • Multi-tiered application development approach
  • Leveraging Microsoft SQL Server and .net architecture
  • Hosted on AWS using SQL AlwaysOn high-availability group cluster design
  • Clustered and fault-tolerant databases within the same region
  • Cross-region failover provided

Challenges

  • Outdated single platform environment created instability
  • A mission-critical application lacking current HA and management capabilities
  • No ability for regionalized business process support

Results

This 6-month project delivered a secure and scalable solution proven out during the on-set of COVID which required a 30% increase in capacity to be delivered on demand. Having just finished the final migration of the single platform to 6 regional environments, our customers quickly provided the customer service experience their customers have come to expect. The new environment-by-country solution provided additional web and application servers on the fly to scale as necessary.

Successes
  • New high-availability and regional failover solution implemented
  • Country independence allowing patch and downtime management
  • Global communication plan led to a smooth transition
  • No outage during the migration of this mission-critical system