Hexaware’s Cost-Effective and Secure Approach to Application and Data Modernization on AWS

By Chirodip Pal, Assistant Vice President, Cloud Product Engineering – Hexaware
By Apoorv Saxena, Product Marketing Manager – Hexaware
By Shilpa Tyagi, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS

Hexaware

According to Gartner, by 2025 two-thirds of spending (65.9%) on application software will be directed toward cloud technologies, up from 57.7% in 2022. A successful application and data modernization strategy to cloud is a prerequisite for enterprises looking to be competitive and wanting to serve customers in an agile and cost-effective way.

The use of commercial databases like Oracle DB and middleware like Oracle WebLogic can become blockers in a company’s migration journey to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Customers find the licensing and maintenance of commercial applications expensive, and are often locked in between license renewals of Oracle DB.

Eliminating expensive commercial databases and adopting open source, lightweight, and cloud-native platforms like Postgres in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) or Amazon Aurora can decrease total cost of ownership (TCO).

However, this involves refactoring millions of lines of complex legacy code which can be a manual, complex, and time-consuming process that could drag on long enough to negate the cost reduction benefits of migration.

In this post, we will explore how Hexaware Technologies, an AWS Specialization Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller with the Migration Consulting Competency, leverages its well-defined migration methodology and automated cloud migration and management platform Amaze for replatforming of legacy applications. Amaze also helps with replatforming of existing databases and middleware to AWS infrastructure, resolving blockers for cloud migration due to license constraints.

Solution Overview

Success in migrating applications and data from Oracle DB to Postgres in Amazon RDS or Amazon Aurora requires a well-defined migration methodology comprised of three steps:

Determine applications for migration.
Select your migration approach.
Determine the workload treatment.

Step 1: Determine Applications for Migration

There are many ways to migrate, but not all of them are right for your application portfolio. Two major factors to consider for each application when determining the rationalization of the portfolio are:

Business value of the application.
Custom business logic of the application.

Step 2: Select Your Migration Approach

Based on the above factors, select your approach:

Refactor: Refactor applications using the AWS Well-Architected Framework when the custom logic of applications is high and cannot be replaced with a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution. This is specifically useful when the need is to transform business processes by introducing new processes and business lines.
Replace: Replace existing applications that have a higher business value and lower custom business logic with cloud-native COTS products. These provide all of the required business logic and reduce the cost and effort to maintain and manage as compared to native applications. These tasks are handled by the service provider.
Rehost/Replatform: Rehost existing applications when both the business value or criticality and custom business logic of the application are high, and/or if the application requires continuous enhancements and high performance. Modernizing these applications and moving them to the cloud enables you to experience the benefits of cloud-native services. Leveraging infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) brings even greater benefit.
Retire: When both the business value and custom business logic of the application is low, they can be retired by consolidating their functionality into existing applications.

Figure 1 – Application portfolio rationalization.

Most of Hexaware’s client engagements are centered around the re-platforming of business-critical and high-value applications. The team often migrates such applications to cloud as a platform as a service (PaaS) that provides hardware and software tools over the internet for developers to design apps and simplify the application design and development process.

The team also migrates applications to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for better scalability, performance, and improved release time-to-market.

Hexaware’s deep expertise in rehosting and replatforming applications on AWS enables customers to experience a faster, better, and cost-effective migration. Bringing in an experienced service provider as a partner, especially one with helpful proprietary tools like a cloud migration platform, is the best way to ensure your cloud transformation succeeds on-time and on-budget.

Step 3: Determine the Workload Treatment

Once Hexaware has determined the migration approach based on application portfolio rationalization, the next step is to determine the target tech stack based on the source workload. The team will implement a repeatable framework of determining the workload treatment and migration to AWS.

Figure 2 – Hexaware’s Amaze framework to identify workload treatment.

If the enterprise application stack consists of a legacy Java application running on Oracle WebLogic and Oracle DB, for example, the recommendation would be to replatform the legacy application to Amazon EKS because.

This saves time and money for developers, as they get easy access to the application development environment and infrastructure, as well as access to end-to-end management services of platform maintenance and backup.

Databases and middleware become blockers for cloud migration where customers spend heavily on licenses and maintenance. Hexaware’s framework takes this into consideration and recommends replatforming high-cost and high-maintenance on-premises databases. The replatforming is performed by implementing a high degree of automation allowing for a faster, cost-effective, and secure migration and modernization process which provides TCO benefits without compromising on critical features.

Customer Success Story

A leading secondary mortgage company that provides mortgage-backed securities wanted to perform an Oracle-to-AWS migration for its 15-year-old and highly complex Java SOAP-based web services and batch programs developed on WebLogic (app server and MQ).

These were developed using Axis, JAX-WS APIs, JAXB, and JSP, and the on-premises database was on Oracle. The client wanted to perform cloud migration to AWS as a containerized application by using the Aurora PostgreSQL database in development, testing, and production environments.

Challenge

There were a host of problems the client was facing. For example, the scheduler in the legacy application was not able to scale in the AWS Cloud environment. This legacy application used the WebLogic queue to process 50,000 messages per hour, and it shared files via an application server file system which impacted the file processing in the cloud.

As this application was business-critical and handled key financial processes, moving 13 web services to production without impacting business-as-usual was a major task.

Solution

Hexaware leveraged its proprietary automated cloud replatforming solution for applications to handle the complexity. This enabled the team to follow an automation roadmap for achieving this Oracle-to-AWS migration without any impact on day-to-day business.

SOAP-based web services were converted to REST web services, replatformed to Spring Boot, and deployed in an Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate container.
Used AWS Step Functions and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) task scheduler to schedule batch jobs.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) were used to replace WebLogic queue for processing messages.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) was used for sharing files between the application and the account.
All the Data Definition Language (DDL) objects, like stored procedures, packages, and functions, were migrated along with the data to Aurora PostgreSQL automatically within four weeks.

Benefits

The benefits provided to the client by leveraging Hexaware’s patented automated replatforming solution to Aurora PostgreSQL database on AWS were as follows:

Faster migration: 60% faster development, deployment, and migration.
Better migration: Consistent delivery quality due to repeatable framework.
Cost-effective migration: TCO reduction to 50%, mainly due to the elimination of WebLogic application server, FTP server synchrony, and Oracle database server licensing costs.
Accelerated migration: Due to the high level of automation leveraged.

Conclusion

Enterprises are looking to reduce their IT infrastructure costs, and many have already made their first move to the cloud. AWS enables enterprise to move their on-premises application and database landscape to the cloud and realize substantial benefits in terms of cost, security, and compliance.

The challenge is determining the right path to the cloud and which migration process will be most impactful. Organizations often lack the technical know-how and are looking for service providers to share expertise and a differentiated solution that saves time and cost in the migration process.

Hexaware, with its automated cloud migration and management platform Amaze, assists enterprises as they navigate through these challenges. Hexaware delivers a holistic solution to application and database migration which enables enterprises to benefit from an accelerated, secure, and cost-effective migration.

To start your application and data modernization journey, please contact awssales@hexaware.com.

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Hexaware – AWS Partner Spotlight

Hexaware is an AWS Specialization Partner and next-generation provider of IT services. Hexaware has multiple AWS Competencies, including DevOps and Migration Consulting.

Contact Hexaware | Partner Overview | AWS Marketplace