INDUSTRY WATCH
THIS MIGRATION PROJECT WITH THE ENTERPRISE TOOLING TEAM DEMONSTRATES ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL ENGAGEMENT BETWEEN STANDARD BANK AND SYNTHESIS AND CONTINUES TO SHOW SYNTHESIS ’ COMMITMENT TO ITS LONG-STANDING PARTNERSHIP WITH STANDARD BANK .
cChallenge
A number of significant outages were experienced on this toolset due to the on-premise infrastructure having aged . Users were faced with an increase in outages impacting delivery . This and the group ’ s cloud aspiration were the catalysts to migrate the Atlassian toolset to AWS .
Solution
Standard Bank of South Africa approached AWS for assistance and were encouraged to partner with Synthesis due to the company ’ s experience in migrating Atlassian workloads to AWS for other corporates . Due to the importance of this toolset in support of the DevSecOps journey , a dedicated , scalable , resilient and secure platform was required . Over and above this , the ability to spin up instances on demand , scale when required , deploy to multiple regions with the comfort of multiple availability zones for high availability resulted in the bank partnering with AWS .
Through the partnership with Synthesis , detailed migration plans and timelines were crafted . An assessment of the current on-prem infrastructure including operating systems and databases was undertaken and these specifications were scripted in Cloud Formation scripts .
These reusable scripts were used to build the base infrastructure in AWS on which these applications would be installed . Jira and Confluence were identified as the first applications for migration . As this was new to the Enterprise Tools team , a steep but fast learning curve was undertaken with a number of trial and errors involved . An example being the destroying of instances and creating new ones until they were 100 % right .
Keshni Govender from the Standard Bank Enterprise Tools Team , said : “ Our experience from the past three months has been tremendous . The meantime to restore impacted services has improved significantly . No longer do we need time to troubleshoot issues while users are impacted . Failover has been built in and the Jira and Confluence instances recovers almost immediately , causing far less impact to users .”
Soraya Omar , Practice Lead , Software Engineering Tools , Standard Bank Group explained that : “ Foundation training for deploying to cloud was essential for setting ourselves up for success . Having dedicated people , a migration partner in Synthesis and the appropriate support structure from within Standard Bank and AWS we were able to reach our cloud aspiration effortlessly .”
“ Moving the Atlassian stack to the AWS Cloud has already shown true benefit with doing such a migration ,” say Nick Cadenhead , Customer Success Manager , Synthesis . “ Being able to right-size the infrastructure for the Atlassian Stack demonstrates true value upfront by using such AWS Cloud services like EC2 and auto scaling for applications and RDS for databases . Applications are allocated to the right resources to meet demand and can scale automatically to meet demand spikes like application build cycles from a large developer community . Database maintenance is managed by the cloud itself so support personnel are freed up to work on more important tasks for the business .”
Jonathan Matus , Business Developer Executive , Synthesis added : “ This migration project with the Enterprise Tooling team demonstrates another successful engagement between Standard Bank and Synthesis and continues to show Synthesis
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