Migration of WorkBuster to AWS

Workbuster reached out to Opsio as an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, and wished to lean on our experience of migrating mission critical workloads into the AWS cloud. They wanted to take advantage of the high security standards, flexible and highly available services, and frameworks such as the AWS Well Architected Framework. They knew that these kinds of resources and ideas would ensure the continued success of their software platform and their business.

With Workbuster’s software platform being used so widely around the world, a near-zero downtime approach was absolutely critical. The data is key to their business, which was held in a MySQL instance inside the vmWare hypervisor. This needed to be migrated to the cloud with as little disruption as possible.

Opsio design solutions with consistency and repeatability in mind. Therefore the Workbuster solution was deployed using AWS CloudFormation templates. This means that the infrastructure design can be versioned and managed like any other piece of software code, and in that way was very relatable to the team at Workbuster, who were predominantly of a development background. This fits nicely with the ideas around DevOps which we try to bring to all the clients we work with, since changes can be managed, tracked, and deployed quickly and easily when necessary.

The infrastructure deployment itself has been developed iteratively, allowing Workbuster’s software platform the opportunity to benefit from the new opportunities opened by using cloud technologies. The initial phase saw the deployment of a platform utilising AWS Route53 for DNS resolution to an Application Load Balancer. The load balancer handles the SSL offload, and in this way takes some work away from the back-end application servicing infrastructure.

Added benefits

The added benefit of using an AWS Application Load Balancer being that it is infinitely scalable too. Behind the load balancer is an EC2 instance, backed by multi-availability zone, highly available MySQL managed database inside the Relational Database Service RDS. Once updates have been made to the application code, an autoscaling group will be deployed between the Application Load Balancer and the EC2 instance, allowing for limitless horizontal scaling and elasticity. This feeds into the iterative approach used with this client and speaks of the continuing relationship Opsio keeps with our clients, who rely on our expertise and advice.

Adherence to the security best practices of the Well Architected Framework, and to satisfy the client’s requirement for strong security focus with their new platform, encryption in transit is handled and terminated by the Application Load Balancer itself, as discussed. Encryption at rest is taken care of by enabling encryption of the RDS storage, which is as easy as changing one option!

And of course, operational excellence is achieved in part thanks to monitoring using CloudWatch dashboards and alarms.