Progressive migration of in-house and on-premise services/infrastructure into a high-availability robust cloud platform.  Amazon’s AWS platform was selected due to its maturity and identified suitability to software and development platforms.

Primary objectives were driven by lowering CAPEX costs, reducing OPEX with minimal compute power which could burst with demand, and lowering payroll costs linked to traditional infrastructure.

Secondary objectives were driven by increased high-availability, improved SDLC time-frames, simplified management, and scalable backup/DR functions utilizing native AWS modules and API.

Primary challenges involved changes to infrastructure automation and SDLC automation, which were mitigated with extensive pre-planning to understand future requirements leading to an early implementation of supporting systems; i.e. migration to Jenkins platform from Atlassian Bamboo, and reconfiguration of IP based API calls to split-DNS based calls.

Secondary challenges involved infrastructure and integrated architecture changes, which were mitigated with simplistic tweaks to existing architecture and substitution of fat systems with native AWS services; i.e. replacing SendMail and PostFix relay clusters with native AWS SES integration.