As a SaaS business, Lumesse stood to gain a large amount from the cloud. We took an iterative approach to migrating Lumesse to AWS, which began with collaboration to gather requirements that could be turned into a blueprint for repetition in each of the desired regions. Nordcloud are migrating two of the applications – each of which has multiple customers with 10s of thousands of end users – region by region, first starting with a region only having 10 customers, moving on to a region with 30, and in the current iteration, a region with over 200 customers.

The process by which we have moved each customer has allowed us to improve delivery, using CloudFormation to initialise environments and subsequently using Chef to configure instances. This has vastly improved the deployment and configuration of each component of the service, such as database and contributes toward the end goal for Lumesse. Where possible in the first iteration, Nordcloud developed templates that could be used to deploy a Region with VPCs and the relevant networking and security based on the parameters for that site. Subsequently the next layer of the stack is also managed by templates through CloudFormation and will provision the VPC Peering, Security Groups and VPN connectivity to extend their current Data Centers for each region. Finally templates are then used to deploy Directory, SQL and Web servers, as well as the required security groups, configuration and ELBs for each customer.

Once instances are bootstrapped, they are handed over to Chef to allow configuration of the Servers and the Software they host. This has allowed us to capture the majority of system configuration that Lumesse use and replicated the delivery of Servers, saving hours for each customer build.

Conducting a migration as such – from a very traditional hardware configuration – has required a shift in culture too. Nordcloud are helping Lumesse understand how to prepare their applications and servers for operation in the cloud, making use of automation technology that can ensure their applications will cope with failure or scaling events. To really help achieve the goal of operating a true Multi-Tenanted Highly Available SaaS Platform, we have encouraged and enabled teams to understand the need to communicate more freely from the outset of a project. As a result, workflow is improving and with each iteration ‘we’ as a team of Lumesse and Nordcloud are accelerating the path to success.