Case Study: AWS Customer Success
Cloud computing with AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers — including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.
Let us now see the case study of some companies that uses AWS Service.
Wipro
Wipro Limited is a leading information technology, consulting, and business process services company. Wipro has a dedicated workforce of over 170,000, serving clients in 175 cities across six continents.
We have reduced response times for our support ticketing solution by 50% by using AWS.”
Raja Ukil
CIO & Senior Vice President, Wipro Limited
The Challenge
The Corporate IT team at Wipro is responsible for the applications and infrastructure used by Wipro employees globally. Over the last few years, Wipro’s IT leadership has focused on themes of simplification, automation, and digitization to deliver great end-user experiences, enhance productivity, and to make IT more agile and cost-effective. Wipro was an early adopter of cloud technologies and had experienced the benefits of scalability, speed of application deployment, and elimination of hardware refreshes. It had also seen a reduction in operational cost from moving to the cloud.
One of Wipro’s applications is Helpline, a mission critical application which processes around 200,000 helpdesk tickets from employees each month. These tickets, which are routed to departments such as IT support, human resources, and facilities management, cover a wide variety of requests. Helpline also integrates with multiple corporate applications and IT systems. Wipro found the on-premise infrastructure supporting the Helpline application couldn’t deliver the performance, scalability, and availability it required.
Kavitha Kadambi, general manager for strategic initiatives at Wipro Limited, says, “A cloud platform would give us the flexibility to scale capacity on-demand. It would also improve speed of deployment, enhance availability, and reduce operational cost. Addressing the infrastructure challenges would allow us to focus our efforts on enhancing Helpline using new technologies such as machine learning and data analytics.”
Why Amazon Web Services
After an evaluation of multiple cloud providers, Wipro chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of the maturity and robustness of the AWS platform. The advantages of the AWS platform included its mature hybrid integration capabilities, advanced network, and security features. In addition, AWS offered a strong track record in operational excellence and service innovation.
To quickly realize the benefits of the cloud, Wipro aimed to complete the entire migration to AWS within 60 days. The project team, led by Ankur Jalpota, practice head, strategy and transformation at Wipro Limited, and in close coordination with AWS architects, drew up a detailed project plan covering the architecture, its connectivity, a migration plan, and user acceptance testing. The target AWS architecture was designed to deliver high availability for each component of the three-tier application. This includes a SQL server always-on (AON) configuration for the database and servers distributed across two availability zones, enhanced performance using solid-state drive (SSD) storage volumes, and secure access to each web addresses using secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption. It also includes restricting access to instances using a combination of security groups and network access control lists (ACL), and leverage SSL off-loading, reverse proxy, caching, and sticky sessions on the load balancer.
A key part of the migration plan involved ensuring that the 12 integrations between the Helpline application on AWS and other on-premise systems in the Wipro datacenter were documented and thoroughly tested. These included a cloud-operations-center solution, an IT asset management system, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, an authentication system, and an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. Wipro also chose to introduce machine learning capabilities to resolve tickets faster by integrating Helpline with the Wipro HOLMES Artificial Intelligence Platform™.
“We were able to meet our migration deadline thanks to the great coordination between the Wipro and AWS teams. We had contingency and roll-back plans in place at the time of cutover but didn’t have to invoke any of them. This was definitely one of the smoothest cloud migrations we have experienced to date,” says Ramakanta Chowdhury, program manager, strategy and transformation at Wipro Limited.
Today, when employees want to raise a ticket, they login to the Helpline application, which is now running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, launched inside Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environments. To manage the variable loads the application frequently experiences, Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling distribute incoming traffic and scale the number of Amazon EC2 instances. Data backups and snapshots are durably stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). AWS CloudTrail records all API calls, which enables security analysis and compliance auditing by Wipro staff.
The Benefits
Moving to AWS has ensured easy access to the Helpdesk application anytime and from anywhere. “We have reduced response times for our support ticketing solution by 50 percent using AWS, enhancing employee satisfaction and productivity,” says Raja Ukil, chief information officer and senior vice president at Wipro Limited. The performance of the AWS environment and the addition of machine learning have reduced the time it takes to close tickets. “After going live, we started monitoring the utilization of our resources and fine-tuned the infrastructure sizing,” says Ankur Jalpota. “This resulted in an additional 20 percent reduction in our initially provisioned infrastructure versus what we forecasted. This was simply not possible in our on-premise environment.”
“The Helpline migration to the AWS Cloud has been a great opportunity to partner with AWS to deliver improved business and IT alignment.” says Ankur Jalpota. “We intend to build on this strategic partnership by leveraging AWS capabilities in the areas of artificial intelligence, mobility, and analytics.”
Wipro and AWS also share a strong global partnership which continues to expand rapidly, and its joint customers are benefitting from the shared value of putting customers first and a strong focus on innovation at the intersection of business and technology.
Varun Dube, general manager — AWS practice at Wipro Limited says, “Innovation is in our organization’s DNA. This success story is a great testimony to how Wipro is leveraging AWS for innovating and reimagining its internal business platforms and processes in the digital era. We have been a premier consulting partner of AWS for five years, and we aim to be an innovation-led cloud partner in our customers’ digital transformation journey with a strong foundation on AWS. We have a strong 360-degree partnership with AWS, and our “customer first” approach is key in creating three-way-wins for clients, Wipro, and AWS.”
SAMSUNG
Samsung Migrates 1.1 Billion Users across Three Continents from Oracle to Amazon Aurora with AWS Database Migration Service
The scalability of Amazon Aurora is the best benefit — especially if we focus on the cost.”
Salva Jung
Principal Architect and Engineering Manager
Samsung reduced monthly database costs by 44%.
The cloud, as it turns out, is big enough for everyone. It’s even big enough for Samsung Electronics, the world’s second-largest IT company by revenue. As users of Samsung Account — the company’s certification and authorization service — ballooned to over 1.1 billion, the electronics giant decided it was time to move its massive database away from its monolithic legacy Oracle internet data center (IDC) solution, which was expensive and made it difficult to scale to accommodate growing traffic. Looking to the cloud, Samsung Electronics found Amazon Web Services (AWS) a perfect fit for this shift. In less than 18 months, Samsung Electronics migrated its global Samsung Account data to Amazon Aurora, a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud. This migration from Oracle resulted in a profound cost reduction as Samsung was able to free itself from the restrictive licensing costs of the on-premises legacy database. With the migration to cloud-native Aurora, Samsung is able to focus on innovating and positioning itself for the company’s expected growth.
Easing the Great Migration with AWS Database Migration Service
For Samsung, one of Aurora’s most attractive features was that 85–90 percent of the PostgreSQL queries in Aurora matched the existing Oracle queries, meaning that converting the queries to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL would be practically automatic. The company had 2–4 TB of data to migrate for each of the three regions — the European Union, China, and the United States — and it needed help ensuring everything went smoothly and successfully.
Samsung Electronics began the migration process in the European Union in October 2018 by creating dedicated lines between the IDC and the application programming interface, which acted as the gateway to Aurora. Then AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) — which supports data migrations, including heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms such as Oracle to Aurora — initiated the transition of the data. As the data left the IDC for its new home, AWS DMS ensured that the source database remained operational so that end users could still access Samsung Account as usual. At the same time, AWS DMS replicated the large-scale heterogeneous database, duplicated 2 or 3 TB of user data in 3–4 days, and routed user traffic one by one from the IDC to the cloud. In just about 22 weeks, Samsung transitioned to Aurora, migrating 4 TB of data and converting nearly 3,000 queries. “AWS provided us the best information at the appropriate time,” says Jung. “And AWS had lots of tools and services to help the migration — AWS DMS is one example.”
Samsung completed the EU migration by April 2019, the China migration by October 2019, and the US migration by March 2020, all with minimal downtime. “We had some downtime but not much,” says Jung. “The important thing is that we detected problems quickly and minimized the user impact.
Volkswagen Group
The Volkswagen Group manufactures 12 of the world’s most iconic automotive brands, including Volkswagen passenger cars, Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, and Ducati motorcycles. The group also includes TRATON, a leading manufacturer of light-duty commercial vehicles, trucks, and buses. Just as Volkswagen revolutionized personal car ownership with its legendary “Beetle,” the group plans revolutionize its global operations, building the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud on AWS with the goal of becoming the world’s leading software-driven automotive company.
We will continue to strengthen production as a key competitive factor for the Volkswagen Group. Our strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services will lay the foundation.”
Oliver Blume
CEO of Porsche AG
How Volkswagen Connects 124 Factories to the Cloud Using AWS | Volkswagen Group
The Volkswagen Group manufactures about 11 million cars per year and brings 200 million parts per day into its factories — a massive scale at which to operate an effective global supply chain. Volkswagen is working with AWS to move its 124 factory sites to a single architecture: the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud. As a next step, the Group will integrate Volkswagen’s global network of more than 30,000 suppliers into the Industrial Cloud. The company uses AWS machine learning services — running algorithms using information gathered from sensors on the shop floor–and AWS Outposts.
How Volkswagen Uses AWS IoT to Build Industrial Cloud | Volkswagen Group
The Volkswagen Group is building its Industrial Cloud, a cloud-based digital production platform that will transform Volkswagen’s automotive manufacturing and logistics processes, on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Using AWS IoT services, the digital production platform will connect data from all machines, plants, and systems across Volkswagen’s 124 factory sites to increase plant efficiency and uptime, enhance production flexibility, and improve vehicle quality.
Volkswagen Builds Digital Ecosystem Using AWS | Volkswagen Group
The Volkswagen Group is working to become a leading provider of sustainable mobility with its “TOGETHER — Strategy 2025” program. A key element of this program is the Group’s One Digital Platform (ODP), which provides a holistic digital ecosystem connecting Volkswagen vehicles with customers, Volkswagen mobility services, and partners. The Volkswagen Group is setting up a cloud platform on AWS, using services, such as AWS Direct Connect, AWS Lambda, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon Route 53, to migrate and re-platform its existing on-premises backend, empower internal teams, and reduce time-to-market.
RIO Builds On AWS to Bring Digital Innovation to the Transportation and Logistics Sector | RIO
Part of the TRATON Group, RIO develops digital products that connect logistics and telematics data to offer shippers and carriers real-time visibility into their shipments. RIO collaborates with Volkswagen Group Logistics, which operates 18,000 truckloads across Europe daily. The company started in the cloud and is now embracing an AWS-first mentality, favoring solutions built on AWS over self-hosted ones. RIO uses AWS to create an open, scalable, and agile unified cloud platform for transportation and logistics management on which everyone in the supply chain can connect.
That’s all folks. Thank you for reading :)
