AWS Services Support Building Supply’s Data Migration

When you compete in an industry dominated by a handful of established, decades-old market leaders with offices that span the globe, agility and speed gives a strong business advantage. A building supply company with over 4,000 employees in 80 offices serving customers throughout North America needed its IT department to evolve from reactive problem solvers to proactive business drivers. It needed to turn terabytes of collected data into actionable insights and quickly spin up scalable applications to address rapidly changing market demands and customer buying behaviors. It needed business agility. It needed Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the cloud professionals at NTT DATA.

Members of NTT DATA’s data and cloud practices knew that AWS would provide the best, most comprehensive cloud solution to address the business’s needs. As they do with all cloud clients, they made sure to start with this question — What should the perfect outcome look like? With that goal always top of mind, they ensured the following key elements were addressed to support the client’s desired outcome.

Centralization

A key component of any successful cloud migration is how shared services are addressed, such as login information, security, scalability, visibility and which infrastructures and resources will be required for access management (AD).

Standardization

By using the AWS EC2 Image Builder, NTT DATA teams simplified the building, testing and deployment of VMs and container images, removing the need to build automation scripts to maintain images. With AWS EC2 Image Builder, the client’s images are easily maintained and kept updated through an intuitive, graphical interface that includes built-in automation that removes error-prone manual steps.

Load Balancing and Auto Scaling

To detect the health of AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, the client uses AWS Elastic Load Balancing. It sits in front of EC2 and increases application availability by automatically adding or reducing capacity and diverting traffic from unhealthy to healthy EC2 instances. 

AWS Auto Scaling replaces the bad node and returns the network to a healthy state. It monitors the client's applications and capacity, automatically adjusting to deliver a steady, predictable performance and making recommendations to optimize performance and costs. 

Network and Management Services

With AWS CloudWatch, the client easily monitors the health and integrity of its instances with a unified view of the resources, services and applications that are running on AWS. AWS CloudWatch detects anomalous behaviors and allows users to set alarms, take automated actions, troubleshoot, view metrics and logs side-by-side, and gain insights to keep applications running smoothly and safely.

Moving forward is now repeatable, predictable and safe

With AWS CloudFormation, there is no need for the client to recreate the wheel when it is time to create new instances. Mirroring related AWS services and third-party resources means provisioning is quick and consistent. By using an AWS CloudFormation template, the client can customize desired resources and related dependencies can be plugged in so infrastructures and applications can be launched and delivered as a stack. Best practices can be automated to satisfy compliance, security and configuration standards across all AWS accounts through a single operation. It means resource lifecycles can be managed to make them repeatable, predictable and safe.

Moving forward, we recommend that the client use Amazon Kinesis to immediately respond to data collected it collects from its site-based video, audio, and IoT devices as well as from its website traffic. As a fully managed solution that runs streaming without the need to manage infrastructures, it can handle any amount of data and process it from thousands of sources with low latencies. And it could easily integrate with the client’s third-party tools.

For additional reading on how cloud technology can help reach your migration goals, subscribe to the Tech Blog below.