LTTS Pulse
From saving on premises infrastructure cost to high availability and unlimited storage capacity on S3, LTTS achieved all this by migrating their on premises infrastructure to AWS Cloud.
About the Customer
L&T Technology Services Limited (LTTS) is a global leader in Engineering and R&D (ER&D) services. With 1,145 patents filed & 102 innovation and R&D design centers for 57 of the Global Top 100 ER&D spenders, LTTS lives and breathes engineering. Our innovations speak for themselves – World’s 1st Autonomous Welding Robot, Solar ‘Connectivity’ Drone, and the Smartest Campus in the World, to name a few.
LTTS’ expertise in engineering design, product development, smart manufacturing, and digitalization touches every area of human lives – from the moment one wakes up till the time one goes to bed. With 102 Innovation and R&D design centers globally, we specialize in disruptive technology spaces such as 5G, Artificial Intelligence, Collaborative Robots, Digital Factory, and Autonomous Transport.
Executive Summary
L&T Technology Services Limited (LTTS) is a global leader in Engineering and R&D (ER&D) services. With 719 patents filed for 57 of the Global Top 100 ER&D spenders, LTTS lives and breathes engineering. Their innovations speak for themselves – World’s 1st Autonomous Welding Robot, Solar Connectivity Drone, and the Smartest Campus in the World, to name a few.
Current Challenges by the Customer
Some of the challenges that LTTS were facing are mentioned below as follows:
By having most of their production & non-production workloads running on-premises, one of the key challenges that needed to be addressed was to have a robust solution in place to offload some of the Line-of-business (LOB) applications by migrating it across the cloud infrastructure & convert their Capex costs to Opex.
Some of their critical Prod-level applications running on-premises that used the MS-SQL DB were configured to have features like “High-availability”, “Failover-clustering” & “automatic backups” etc. which needed to be implemented while migrating the same on the cloud as well while removing the overhead of management of MS-SQL licensing part & have a PAYG model in place.
Maintaining Application/DB backups on a regular basis by having a “scalable” & “cost-effective” storage solution in place & eliminating the hassle to rely on any Server in-case in event of failure was needed as well.
Having automation in place for the applications running on the Servers to be available only during specific hours/working hours to the end-users which would help in resolving the problem of “under-utilization” of the apps thus resulting in reduced infra costs & cost-optimized billing.
The Solution Offered
We recommended an AWS solution based on the requirements listed above, leveraging the AWS Application Discovery Service, AWS Application Migration Service, and AWS Database Migration Service to streamline and simplify the migration process and make the most of AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Direct Connect, Patch Manager, and so on.
Important phases of Migration:
1. Assess Phase
During the Assess phase, the Pentagon team thoroughly examined their current apps, dependencies, and infrastructure by analysing their on-premises applications and collecting critical data for the migration operation using the AWS Application Discovery Service. The service helps in the identification of application interconnections, resource utilization, and performance measures. This review provided useful information regarding the migration’s complexity and prerequisites.
2. Mobilize Phase
During the Mobilise phase, the Pentagon team began preparing for the migration by establishing the necessary AWS infrastructure and services by using the AWS Application Migration Service to create a destination environment within AWS, which involved configuring resources such as virtual machines, storage, networking, and security groups. This service allowed for the replication of on-premises applications in the cloud, ensuring a smooth transition.
3. Migration and Modernize Phase
The infrastructure was migrated by utilizing AWS Application Migration Service for the application, databases housed on EC2 servers, and numerous other production workloads
Description of the detailed solution:
- We suggested a solution to the customer involving hosting the Servers securely in Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) instances which effortlessly protects and manages the applications & its database.
- We launched a custom Amazon Virtual Private Cloud network in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) & further created public/private subnets within it for Testing/Development/Production Servers in different availability zones.
- Launched the Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute Instances for APP & DB Servers for the 3 environments across the respective subnets, respectively, and updated the Network Security Group level firewall rules for the Amazon EC2 instances to secure traffic across them.
- Deployed an AWS Network Load Balancer on top of ALB & connected it to the AWS Virtual Network Gateway.
- To ensure high availability across the Production DB Servers, they were configured to be in different Availability Zones (AZs) in an “SQL always-on failover cluster” thus taking care of the replication between them. Cluster configuration was done between “Pulse Production DB Server-1a” & “Pulse Production DB Server-1b” and in between “Pulse Production DB Server-1a” & “Pulse Production Windows Server.”
- Backups for the EC2 instances using EBS Snapshots were configured & AWS S3 was used to store those as per the policies configured.
- Monitoring/performance-based alerts were set up on the Amazon EC2 instances using Amazon CloudWatch along with Amazon CloudTrail for tracking all the API calls made to the EC2 instances via the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)/ SDK tools. The corresponding logs generated were kept stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) within respective folders segregated as per date & time.
Amazon Web Services Infrastructural Services Used
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (AWS VPC)
Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (AWS EC2)
Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (AWS ELB)
Amazon Elastic Block Store (AWS EBS)
Amazon Simple Storage Service (AWS S3)
Amazon Backup (AWS Backup)
Amazon Internet Gateway (AWS IGW)
Amazon Direct Connect
Amazon Transit Gateway
Amazon Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM)
Amazon CloudWatch
Microsoft Services Used
Microsoft Windows Operating System
Microsoft Windows Server
Microsoft ASP.NET framework
Microsoft IIS Manager
Microsoft Active Directory
Microsoft SQL Database (Enterprise edition)
Project Start Date: January 2022
Project End Date: February 2023
The Benefits:
- Saving on On-premises infrastructure cost: By hosting their infrastructure on AWS Cloud. LTTS could save costs incurred in on-premises hardware purchase, maintenance, power consumption, dedicated space for Servers, etc.
- Achieved infra level High Availability with SQL always-on: On top of high availability EC2 instances, we have configured Instance level high availability with help of Windows failover clustering and an always-on availability group for the Since the client had DB data of over 1.5 TB, in that case moving to the RDS offering of MS-SQL Standard would reduce the in-depth manageability of the data along with the increased cost of operating the same which is something that wasn’t acceptable.
- Backup with unlimited storage with S3: Local Database and application backups are scheduled to move on Amazon S3 to reduce the costs for storage of backups.
- On-demand cost optimization: By using the Lambda function, they were able to automate the start and stop of EC2 Servers (from 9 AM to 11 PM) as per their working hours, resulting in on-demand instances cost
About Pentagon System and Services Pvt Ltd
Pentagon System and Services Pvt Ltd is a leading Infrastructure service provider and System Integrator with a presence across India and Singapore.
Established more than two decades ago, we cater to over 1200+ Enterprises and SMEs with highly experienced teams for sales, consultants and a vast pool of skilled engineers supporting their mission-critical environments, which covers multi-vendor, multi-platform infrastructure.
We are an advanced tier Consulting Partners with Amazon Web Services and are also a certified Solution Provider. We serve more than 100 plus customers across segments and verticals with our expertise on the cloud platform.
Solution Architecture Diagram
