HCM Platform Creates Hybrid DR Capability
DevOps on AWS Case Study Creating a Hybrid DR Capability for this HCM Platform
About this HCM Platform
This company offers a set of web-based applications that provide the technology to power various aspects of corporate human resources functions – including hiring, training, recruitment and safety. The company has been very successful globally, and has a multi-region global IT infrastructure, including data processing operations in the United Kingdom.
The Challenge
For several reasons, they wished to create a hybrid DR capability in the cloud that would be reliable and easy to manage. Jason Losh, director of development, understood that, because their business involves continuous product development, the DR capability needed to include an automated code deployment pipeline — allowing for changes that were moved to production, to also be replicated in DR. “We knew that AWS gives us outstanding capabilities to establish DevOps best practices, and we wanted to get the most out of the platform,” Losh said. “We were also exploring a long-term strategy of production in the cloud, so we didn’t wish to simply replicate our production environment at the block level. We wanted to establish a cloud footprint that could later be used to migrate production to the Cloud, and we wanted to build a ‘cloud native’ version of production, using AWS best practices.” Losh wanted to take an “Infrastructure-as-Code” approach to the cloud, and required that the entire stack — from networking to software code — be deployable in an automated fashion
The Solution
Blue Sentry worked to provision a VPC in Frankfurt, Germany, to serve as a secondary failover location. Blue Sentry recommended AWS Direct-Connect, which originated at their production colocation facility to allow for data replication and seamless failover. Data replication using SnapMirror provided replication of the data on their NetApp filer across the Direct Connect circuit. Blue Sentry then coded the deployment of the infrastructure stack in Terraform to give them the capability of deploying the VPC in an automated fashion in minutes. Finally, Blue Sentry then assisted them in establishing code deployment pipelines using Ansible playbooks for orchestration, so that the DR environment would stay in constant sync with the latest versions of the production code base.
The Benefits
New DR capabilities
They now has a DR capability that exceeds its RTO and RPO requirements.
Increased consumer confidence
Customers can count on their ability to provide reliably good user experiences.
Significantly more efficient DR infrastructure
DR environment will continue to stay in sync with production, with minimal management cost to them.
About Blue Sentry, Inc. & AWS
Blue Sentry, an AWS Managed Service Partner, elevates businesses to the Amazon Cloud—managing every stage of planning and migration, and providing next-generation managed services to help you continuously optimize your AWS cloud workload.
Organizations using a DevOps model deliver applications quicker and innovate faster. AWS offers infrastructure resources designed to support continuous integration and delivery, infrastructure as code, microservices, and monitoring & logging.