AWS migration of investment portfolio management solution

Solution

Itransition assessed the cost of creating a secure, reliable, and scalable AWS Cloud infrastructure and suggested the most fitting migration tech stack. We also drafted the migration roadmap and risk mitigation plan, providing two options for data rollback.

After preparing the cloud infrastructure, creating and configuring EC2 virtual servers for apps, AWS Directory Service for Active Directory (AD DS), Redis, AWS Relational Database Service (RDS), and Jenkins, Itransition’s team analyzed the business continuity and performance impact of migrating services, apps, sites, data flows, and critical system parts interdependencies. The selected migration strategy allowed Itransition to streamline and facilitate processes while the client enjoyed business continuity.

Based on system interdependencies, we divided all components into two groups, non-critical and critical. Since the existing infrastructure was spread across different systems and used various technologies, we decided to migrate non-critical system parts that could be moved painlessly as a lift and shift migration, a step-by-step migration of live systems using the AWS toolset without major custom development and performed gradually.

For critical and complex database- and latency-dependent apps and sites, our team wrote custom scripts. This allowed us to avoid disrupting app development, QA, and deployment while keeping the apps up to date on the AWS servers. We also created custom scripts to automate the migration and avoid manual errors while maintaining existing app functionality.

During the final migration phase, we used a big band migration approach for the database and database-dependent apps,  transitioning all resources simultaneously. The reason for moving the database and the database-dependent API was to avoid performance issues that could result from a gradual move.

Itransition ensured that dozens of TradeSmith’s database-dependent apps using their own connection strings were part of the proper inventory and were listed and included in migration scripts. Itransition’s team also used proper backups and switched connection strings to new ones.

After creating the website/app switchover roadmap and checklist, Itransition conducted the full switchover, ensuring data consistency during the final stage of the migration. Then the DevOps team performed a database migration of 40+ apps and sites, relying on monitoring tools to timely detect and resolve errors or process disruptions. The remaining apps were migrated by packing app files into a separate archive, transferring them to a new server, importing them into IIS, and running them in the IIS console.

After successful data and app migration, the team ensured DNS records were updated to match the new app network configuration in AWS, including records for all sites and databases. We used low TTLs before the migration to update DNS records quickly and test DNS updates.

Currently, Itransition’s dedicated support team upgrades and extends TradeSmith’s solution, ensuring system scalability, uninterrupted operation, high security, and 24/7 performance.