Ponto da Moda: A Jornada de Migração para a Nuvem e a Expansão do E-commerce (In English)

In 2020, the company decided to start a migration path of its technology operations to the public cloud. Previously, the entire IT infrastructure was implemented in an on-premises environment, preventing growth on the scale that Ponto da Moda needed to start e-commerce operations. With the choice of AWS and Valcann, the entire project was conducted with the scope of:

• Map and model the entire technology architecture based on microsoft solutions;

• Propose technical migration scenarios;

• Conduct a capacity planning and infrastructure dimensioning study;

• Optimize systems architectures and business applications;

• Migrate Windows Servers and SQL Server databases;

• Predict backup and disaster recovery strategy;

• Migrate TOTVS Protheus business application;

• Provide specialized support in cloud computing architecture and technology operation.

Technical enablement

The main challenge in Ponto da Moda’s project was the cost. All the rightsizing work involved not only mapping the client’s historical consumption of resources – using AWS Application Discovery Services – but also benchmarking equivalent environments previously implemented by Valcann – given its experience and automated playbooks for this type of migration. There was a relatively long period of fine tuning, where the TOTVS Protheus application routines went through tuning processes, as well as the Microsoft SQL Server database layer, in order to provide a more efficient indexing – both of data and functions – as well as ensuring that there was no competition with external systems that consume SQL Server data. For this optimization, daily provisioning routines were carried out for data dumps, which were deposited in a transit area, to be imported into customer analysis bases – BI, reports, etc. The main challenge of this project was the fact that, as it is a retail operation, the need for prior tests and validations was fundamental.

AWS Services deployed: 

• Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon EFS, Amazon GuarDuty, AWS CloudTrail, CloudEndure.

Customer issues and concerns that have been overcome:

1. Operational excellence

1.1. Implementation of continuous monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch;

1.2. Integrated connectivity with high available multi zone (Multi-AZ);

2. Security

2.1. Implementation of Amazon GuardDuty for intelligent monitoring of infrastructure perimeter;

2.2. Restriction of external access to the environment, with segregation between private and public subnets for back and front end, respectively;

2.3. Access to the AWS environment for VPN-only administration;

2.4. Encryption of data at rest and in transit.

3. Reliability

3.1. Multiple instance nodes, making it possible to balance reading and writing operations;

3.2. Minimal failover between nodes;

3.3. Using Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to implement snapshot-level backups.

3.4. Automatic backups of the database layer;

4. Excellence in performance

4.1. Calculation of expected environment demand for rightsizing.

5. Cost optimization

5.1. The monitored environment, with a continuous flow of monitoring for rightsizing.

Key Results:

• AWS managed infrastructure service;
• Professional managed services provided;
• 22% performance gain in application response time;
• Implementation of TOTVS application architecture best practices, increasing session availability;
• Centralization of store operations on the AWS cloud infrastructure;
• Implementation of previously not implemented security practices.

Lessons learned:

• The implementation of AWS services, allowed us to focus more on the business aspects of the project;
• Although the planning of projects like this is important, the need for experimentation on the part of the client proved to be fundamental. In this sense, the use of AWS enables a rapid prototyping of architectures;
• Using the AWS Well-Architected framework as a reference helps us to make clear to the customer the value of a good service partner.

About Ponto de Moda