In recent years, Superfrio has undergone a series of transformations in its business, with a broad growth in its operations and performance in the market. With all this growth, digital transformation has also become a major challenge for the company. In this sense, in 2020 the company decided to start a path of complete migration of its technology operations to the public cloud. Previously, the entire IT infrastructure was dispersed in multiple locations, with decentralized management, making the challenge of growth even greater. Thus, the project started with a deep process of strategy building and evaluation of market solutions, as well as, choosing the ideal partners to implement the project.
Case Description
What was proposed:
Recently, Superfrio received a series of investments aimed at accelerating the business and making it the main refrigerated logistics operator in Latin America. Considering this challenge, one of the goals was to implement a world-class infrastructure, in a public cloud, supported by partners who could maintain the entire chain of technology services, end to end. However, the company was challenged to migrate its entire workload to the cloud, which previously ran in two different data centers. With the choice of AWS and Valcann, the entire project was conducted with the scope of:
- Map and model the entire technology architecture;
- Propose technical migration scenarios;
- Conduct a capacity planning and infrastructure dimensioning study;
- Optimize systems architectures and business applications;
- Migrate dozens of Windows Servers and databases (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL)
- Migrate vertical business applications;
- Predict backup and disaster recovery strategy;
- Migrate TOTVS Protheus business application;
- Migrate JDA business application;
- Migrate TOTVS RM business application;
- Migrate Pentaho business intelligence infrastructure;
- Implement an integrated connectivity layer with VPN;
- Provide specialized support in cloud computing architecture and technology operation.
Technical enablement
Migration took place in 2 stages, the first stage being vertical business systems – running on other platforms; and the second stage, being the migration of ERP TOTVS Protheus. Since the migration was in two steps, as the customer had the previous workload running in Brazil, it had to provision the entire workload in São Paulo first, and then provision it in Virginia. As all the previous operation was being performed in a data center in São Paulo, this movement was necessary due to latency issues between AWS and the previous data center during the project. Since the entire migration playbook is provisioned with infrastructure as code (using Hashicorp Terraform), moving between regions has become more agile and effective. Another peculiarity is the fact that some of the workloads that were migrated went through an automatic rehost, using the Cloudendure tool. This was because some of these workloads were legacy systems and could not go through a manual rehost.
AWS Services deployed:
- Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon EFS, Amazon GuarDuty, AWS CloudTrail, CloudEndure.
Customer issues and concerns that have been overcome:
- Operational excellence
- Implementation of continuous monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch;
- Integrated connectivity with high available multi zone (Multi-AZ);
- Security
- Implementation of Amazon GuardDuty for intelligent monitoring of infrastructure perimeter;
- Restriction of external access to the environment, with segregation between private and public subnets for back and front end, respectively;
- Access to the AWS environment for VPN-only administration;
- Encryption of data at rest and in transit.
- Reliability
- Multiple instance nodes, making it possible to balance reading and writing operations;
- Minimal failover between nodes;
- Using Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to implement snapshot-level backups;
- Automatic backups of the database layer;
- Excellence in performance
- Calculation of expected environment demand for rightsizing.
- Cost optimization
- The monitored environment, with a continuous flow of monitoring for rightsizing.
Third-party solutions applied:
- TSPlus: Remote Terminal Service;
- SonicWall UTM: Firewall and VPN connectivity;
- Hashicorp Terraform: Infrasctructure as Code;
- Hashicorp Vault: Secrets and key management service.
Key Results:
- AWS managed infrastructure service;
- Professional managed services provided;
- 17% improvement of TOTVS application response time;
- 100% assertiveness of capacity planning;
- 11% cost reduction from the original AS-IS sizing landscape, considering the implementation of managed services and rearchitecture.
Lessons learned:
- Considering the phasing of large migration projects reduces risk and increases customer value perception;
- It is critical to clearly establish previous baselines of infrastructure metrics in order to measure the gains generated by the project;
- Establishing systematic communication with the client's business areas increases sponsorship and support for the project.
About Superfrio Logística Frigorificada
SuperFrio is a young, dynamic company with a high investment capacity. It concentrates resources both on high quality standards and on new projects that anticipate the growth of its customers. Its mission is to deliver logistical solutions for the food chain in temperature-controlled environments. As a vision, it intends to be the first option in refrigerated logistics solutions in South America, until 2023.