American technology solutions major migrated critical VMs/workloads to Google Cloud
The client is an American technology firm capable of real-time sensing, analysis, and action. It manufactures and sells marking, tracking, and computer printing technologies. The products include mobile computers, tablets, software, thermal barcode and receipt printers, RFID smart label printers, and encoders. Additionally, they provide fixed and handheld readers/antennas, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), machine vision (MV), and fixed industrial scanning hardware and software.
The client operated their business-critical applications on-prem and decided to migrate the workloads to the Google Cloud. They wanted to achieve critical business needs like scalability and high availability by leveraging the latest Google Cloud technology.
Virtusa helped them migrate mission-critical workloads to Google Cloud while automating network/DB/middleware deployment configurations with the help of Jenkins CI/CD DevOps pipelines.
Collaborating with the client, Virtusa migrated several clusters from on-prem data centers to Google Cloud by setting up new environments and then automating the migration of the workloads using open source and CI/CD tools such as Python, Jenkins, Ansible, and Git/GitHub.
The solution implementation involved several tasks, which are listed below.
VM migration includes:
- IBM WebSphere Liberty servers
- IBM Cognos analytics servers
- IBM DB2 servers
Manual tasks were automated in the Google Cloud environment for faster application deployments to meet the customer environment growth in Google Cloud. Virtusa helped to automate the backup of middleware cluster configuration, VM/network configuration automation, and automation of DB data replication to lower environments with the help of Python, Jenkins, and Ansible, GitHub CI/CD pipeline.
VM configuration automation includes:
- VM disk type changes
- VM configuration changes like machine type, tags/labels, host, and service project inventories
- Refactoring Google Cloud command generation code
- Compute engine default service account migration automation
- Change local account user passwords
- SFTP user creation
- NetApp volume creation and updates
- NFS mount automation
Network configuration automation includes:
- Cloud NAT inventory
- DNS record automation
- DNS record backup
- Firewall and load balancer configuration changes
Middleware configuration automation includes:
Middleware cluster backup configuration
DB optimization configuration automation includes:
- Scaling/expanding and region failure availability of DB deployment and reporting/monitoring infrastructure
- Utilities for monitoring DB metrics
- Utilities for improving DB deployments
- Automate data copy for lower environments to meet stakeholder and customer needs using open-source tools in line with Google Cloud per customer needs
Google Cloud/marketplace services
The following Google Cloud native services have been used as part of the migration and automation journey; a few of them are Google Cloud marketplace services as well:
Compute engine
VPC
Global load balancers
Cloud Armour
Cloud routers
Google Cloud Storage
Audit logging
Log explorer
Certificate authority service
Identity and access management
Regional load balancers
Cloud monitoring
Cloud API
Actifio
NetApp
The client experienced improvements in deployment efficiency, high availability, and performance optimization due to successful critical workload migration to Google Cloud. Some of the initial benefits included:
- Faster migration times and reduced manual effort by 50%
- Improved scalability and availability
- Faster, safer, and consistent releases
- Initiation of tech debt reduction and up-to-date with the latest technology stack
End-to-end transformational change