Hobsons – Increasing Scalability with AWS Migration

Hobsons, a leader in the EdTech industry, wanted to migrate all their applications from an on-premises data center to AWS (Amazon Web Services) in order to reap the benefits of cloud computing. Modus Create’s team of experts migrated 14 apps across multiple technologies and 50+ terabytes of files to AWS without causing any major outages. The final solution enabled Hobsons to handle more than 30,000 transactions per minute.

Our work involved

• AWS migration of 14 applications and 50+ terabytes of files
• Using Terraform and CloudFormation to provision separate development and production environments
• Configuring Jenkins CI to support continuous integration and delivery
• Building AMIs using Packer and Ansible
• Deploying application code onto CentOS Linux servers
• Configuring Aurora for heightened data security

Impact

• Reduction in operational costs with scalable cloud infrastructure
• Improved security posture with AWS WAF and Aurora
• Scalable elastic computing capacity with AWS migration
• MySQL backups for data hosting and security on the cloud

Transactions per minute: 30,000, major outages in Migration: 0

Founded in 1974, Hobsons is an education technology company based out of Cincinnati, Ohio. It aids students in discovering best-fit education opportunities through a suite of unique digital products.

Hobsons’ tools have helped over 16 million students reach their full potential by connecting them with over 15000 educational institutions.

Hobsons’ tools have helped over 16 million students

Estimating the TCO

Modus Create’s team of consultants worked together with Hobsons to manage the entire process of migration. The first step was to evaluate whether the project was feasible by calculating its TCO.

After calculating the charges for EC2, S3, ELB, and Aurora, the team concluded that the TCO was an acceptable alternative to existing investment in the self-hosted data center. In addition to the actual costs, the result also took into account the potential benefits of AWS including elastic computing capacity and redundancy.

Building the solution

Now that it was clear that AWS migration is a viable alternative, the next step was to architect and implement a multi-layered solution.

The team used two powerful cloud infrastructure management tools – Terraform and CloudFormation to provision separate development, test, staging, and production environments in AWS. Each application stack used an Auto Scaling Group hooked up to an Elastic Load Balancer or Application Load Balancer, supported by shared Elasticache memcached servers and a MySQL Aurora cluster.

Next, they configured horizontally scalable Jenkins CI infrastructure in AWS to support orchestration and used it to perform builds, tests, and deployments.

Technologies used: prioritizing security

For the project to be successful, scalability alone wasn’t good enough. The new solution had to be more stable and secure than the on-premises data center.

To prioritize security, the team built AMIs using Packer and Ansible, and then wrote CodeDeploy scripts to package and deploy application code onto CentOS Linux servers. They configured Aurora to perform MySQL backups automatically for data security. Elastic IPs allocated to NAT gateways allowed third parties to whitelist services originating from the cluster. The baseline images were hardened using the CIS benchmark and integrated AWS WAF to provide an additional layer of defense.

The impact of migration

Hobsons was able to dramatically reduce reliance on data center systems for critical applications in their portfolio. They successfully moved to a more scalable infrastructure to handle loads in excess of 30,000 transactions per minute, with no major outages and many happy customers.

AWS WAF, Aurora, and MySQL backups helped improve overall security.

Why AWS?

Migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) unlocks efficiencies and operational benefits that businesses never knew were possible. From lower costs to increased speed, AWS helps businesses focus more on core competencies and reimagine how they work and innovate.

If you are considering cloud migration, get in touch with us and learn how AWS can help your business.