Apperian Migrates To The Cloud For Better Performance

The Challenge

As the senior management team at Apperian kept seeing the cost of Amazon Web Services continue to decrease, it was only a matter of time before the company migrated its mission-critical cloud infrastructure that hosts customer-facing applications. The maturity of the AWS infrastructure-as-a-service offering along with improving reliability and security were also key factors.

“As the number of servers we required due to customer growth began growing steadily, so too did our cloud-hosting costs with our previous hosting provider,” says Rob Friedman, Senior Vice President of Engineering for Apperian. “In addition to reducing costs, we also saw the AWS environment as offering more flexibility in the way we manage our infrastructure.”

Friedman hoped to take advantage of the outsourced management capabilities that AWS services enable. This would allow Apperian to offload monitoring and Tier-1 support of the environment from the internal team and share the task with a strategic partner. Doing so would allow the internal team to focus more time on fine-tuning Apperian’s customer-facing applications.

“Partnering with Mission to help us manage our AWS environment allows us to keep our internal team lean. We don’t have to worry about the infrastructure around the clock, and we can focus on automating the deployment and management of our software.”

Rob Friedman
Senior Vice President - Engineering

The Solution

For help in migrating the infrastructure that hosts customer-facing applications to AWS, Apperian turned to its long-time technology partner, Mission. Mission was already supporting the corporate IT infrastructure and hosted internal applications. Mission had also successfully migrated several internal applications to AWS, including Microsoft Active Directory, an AD password self-service application, and a wiki application.

For the infrastructure supporting customer applications, a key factor was finding a way to reduce the amount of downtime for Apperian customers during the migration to AWS. Mission solved this challenge by consulting on best-practices and suggesting technologies—such as Bucardo, an asynchronous PostgreSQL replication system—that enabled Apperian to complete the cut-over with only one hour of downtime.

Results

With Mission providing consultation on AWS best practices and the Apperian internal team taking care of the migration, Apperian has now experienced several AWS benefits:

• Lower cloud-computing base costs—approximately 50% less than the previous cloud hosting provider.
• The ability to invest the savings in additional cloud computing services, when needed
• The flexibility to share management of the cloud environment with Mission.
• No more Tier-1 support and 24x7 monitoring—Mission handles both through its Managed DevOps service.