SThree.

Fully migrating onto AWS.

The Challenge.

SThree, a global recruitment business specialised in offering careers in IT, Banking, Finance, Life Sciences, and Engineering, has an internal IT team dedicated to managing a group-wide IT infrastructure who have decided to adopt a ‘Cloud First’ IT Strategy. While they had started to move some solutions to SaaS products, they had numerous contract and hardware renewal decisions impending, including those of their data centres, and decided now was the time to accelerate their move to the Cloud.

SThree were planning to migrate fully onto AWS and as such had gained a great deal of internal knowledge from AWSome Days, a free one day event run by AWS, and allowing their staff to upskill as part of various projects. Prior to allowing the first applications to be deployed in AWS, SThree invited Nordcloud to provide expert opinion and consultation on their whole migration to ensure they were working according to best-practices, and that their plans created a framework so that all applications that were deployed into AWS were following the same framework.

The Solution.

SThree has designed an architecture for the first application to be migrated into AWS and we began our collaboration with four days of workshops to go through their plans. We reviewed them against AWS Best Practice and suggested improvements where required. By conducting these sessions as a workshop with the SThree team, demonstrations within their own environment, helped everyone in the team gain the required knowledge.

Nordcloud used its experience of deploying hundreds of customer projects to help them convert this into a framework that could be repeatedly used for all applications that they are deploying within AWS. This ensures the minimum components (e.g. Active Directory) need to be deployed for each of the applications and that the operations teams do not need to learn a whole new architecture for every application that is deployed.

As part of the initial four days Nordcloud reviewed Amazon’s Continuous Integration (CI) / Continuous Delivery (CD) solutions (OpsWorks, CodeDeploy/CodePipeline, Elastic Beanstalk), more traditional CI/CD solutions (Jenkins, etc.) and methodologies with SThree before covering off their requirements, best practice for building CI pipelines, and what is required to move these pipelines to CD.

Since then, we’ve been a trusted advisor to SThree and have validated their plans or proposed improved solutions for their migration onto AWS ultimately providing support to SThree’s IT team with their decision making.

The Results.

In addition to the SThree team continuing to develop their AWS Knowledge, specifically around AWS best practice and CI/CD, they also have gained a framework which gives their management confidence that they will be able to operate smoothly in AWS.

SThree have now deployed their framework into AWS and are about to deploy their first application onto the platform. In addition they have identified another 20-30 services that are good candidates to be moved into AWS once the first application is up and running.

Our collaboration continues as SThree’s trusted advisor and we also provide capacity with enterprise support.

“I have been very pleased with the relationship we have developed with Nordcloud and impressed by their technical understanding of the platform, as well as how they have integrated with our team. This is hopefully the beginning of a long relationship where we fully exploit the opportunities presented by AWS.”

Garry Lengthorn
Director of IT Services, SThree

About the Company.

SThree is a global recruitment business specialised in offering careers in IT, Banking, Finance, Life Sciences, and Engineering. The organisation operates under several brand names including Computer Futures, Huxley Associates, Progressive, and JP Gray.

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Ilja Summala
Ilja Summala LinkedIn
CTO
Ilja’s passion and tech knowledge help customers transform how they manage infrastructure and develop apps in cloud.