Migration of Branäsgruppen AB to AWS

Migration Objectives

Ski resorts are inherently seasonal, since we can only ski when there is snow! During these times, the vast majority of the group’s trade is made. Branäsgruppen’s outgoing IT infrastructure was based on VMWare’s ESXi solution, supported by technicians skilled in managing on-premises solutions, from Opsio. The ski window is usually between December and April each year, meaning 5 months of extremely high traffic to the Branäsgruppen’s websites and online applications. They use their IT estate to host their websites and information, including webcam images from the slopes. These resources are heavily relied upon, and so need to be reliable.

Overview

Scaling of the web front-ends, middleware, and most challenging of all, back-end databases needed to be done manually, and in response to demand. This meant that before a scaling event, performance of the group’s IT estate would drop below the high standards set by the business. Connected to the issue of scale, was a problem of deploying new software to the now fragmented virtual server estate. Technicians would need to bring the whole environment down to be able to update the software deployed across the VMware estate. A new solution to the problem of flexibility needed to be found, which is where Opsio helped.

Backup & Recovery Solution

We will have all production systems backed up daily for incremental data, weekly for full backups and 60 days retention. We use AWS native tools like snapshot & RDS backup features to achieve comprehensive backup strategy. Our primary on-premise solution for backup is based on snapshot where in the data on EBS volumes is backed to Amazon S3 by taking point-in-time snapshots. Snapshots are incremental backups, which means that only the blocks on the device that have changed after most recent snapshot are saved. This minimizes the time required to create the snapshot and saves on storage costs.

For application code & other configurations we rely on AWS Code Commit repositories and CloudFormation templates for backing up. In addition to this, application code base is also stored in external Git Hub Repos for additional redundancy. Maintenance of these external Git Hub Repos is outside the scope of this project and currently being handled by the client.

Branäsgruppen measure the success of the AWS deployment project by the customer engagement they receive from their online presence, andsatisfaction feedback they receive from their customers. Uptime of the web applications has improved, and so has latency for those clients who are actively engaging with the applications. Since studies show that a more responsive web application experience manifests in higher conversion rates, this was of key importance to Branäsgruppen, and we are pleased to be able to report a 40% improvement in average page responsiveness.

Partner offerings

We are a go-to provider with end-to-end capabilities to help enterprises innovate faster with cloud enabled business and we have instrumental in achieving that by building a successful & loyal customer base in the Nordics region. We are happy to be partnered with Branas Gruppen in their cloudification journey to AWS.