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World Congress 2021 • Jun 28, 2021

AWS Migration within 3 months

Steffen Heilmann

A hardware crisis sparked an impossible goal. See how Around Home's CTO migrated an entire legacy data center to AWS in three months. Uncover their agile infrastructure secrets.

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#1 about 3 min

Overview of Around Home and their technical landscape

An overview of Around Home's business model and the structural intersection of business and technical operations.

#2 about 4 min

The hardware outage that triggered the rapid migration

How a late-night incident involving missing physical RAM motivated leadership to eliminate volatile on-premise hardware dependencies.

#3 about 4 min

Setting an agile three-month cloud migration goal

Establishing a strict operational deadline while applying agile principles to frame the entire migration as an iterative process.

#4 about 3 min

Technical setup and legacy architecture challenges

Analyzing the baseline data center setup which featured interdependent microservices alongside a complex Galera database cluster.

#5 about 3 min

Slicing the core legacy database for safe migration

Breaking apart a massive legacy database into manageable chunks to safely migrate high-risk legacy tables over time.

#6 about 1 min

Defining critical goals over early cloud-native transformation

Constraining the strategic focus to purely escaping the data center rather than attempting simultaneous cloud-native capability adoptions.

#7 about 5 min

Framing the cloud migration for business stakeholders

Positioning the infrastructure shift to executives as a primary driver for enhanced developer productivity instead of mere cost savings.

#8 about 2 min

Empowering engineering teams with technical autonomy

Entrusting the executing engineering teams with complete autonomy to establish robust infrastructure automation prior to moving legacy apps.

#9 about 3 min

Visualizing migration progress with physical burndown charts

Broadcasting remaining server metrics via a prominent physical burndown chart to increase transparency and foster cross-team problem solving.

#10 about 3 min

Executing the final database migration switchover weekend

Ensuring final cutover stability by deliberately over-provisioning testing databases and assigning dedicated reserve response engineers.

#11 about 3 min

Key retrospective learnings from the rapid infrastructure migration

Actionable takeaways around aggressive task slicing, avoiding scope creep, and maintaining early synchronization with core business units.

#12 about 4 min

Audience questions on cross-department alignment and game days

Techniques for involving application developers earlier through interactive sandbox game days and adapting proposals for non-technical departments.

#13 about 7 min

Audience questions on cloud security and operational capacity

Context on AWS platform data protection audits, operations resource scaling limitations, and strategic cloud provider selection variables.

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