48 Hours, 0 Unplanned Downtime: How Tech Mahindra and AWS Helped RS Group Migrate to the Cloud

RS Group is a global distributor of more than 800,000 MRO products, acting as a middleman between its 2,500 suppliers and its 1.1 million industrial customers such as food and beverage manufacturers and power plants. But as an on-premises operation with a complex technical stack, the ability to rapidly respond to market demands while scaling services and continuously innovating was becoming more difficult.

Technical teams in RS Group had done the work of implementing AWS services and had already moved a large SAP estate and other services. However, the company still needed to migrate its digital production services, which comprised up to 25 percent of the company’s estate. With an upcoming database service renewal—plus some anticipated costly server maintenance—the team decided it was time to partner with a managed service provider (MSP) in its cloud-based modernization efforts.

RS Group chose AWS for a full lift-and-shift migration to the cloud. “AWS offers the innovation and agility that we were looking to get from the cloud, and the partnership that AWS brings to the table is a natural fit with our culture and ambitions,” said Andrew Golds, head of cloud engineering at RS Group. RS Group selected Tech Mahindra, an AWS Partner that holds 10 migration competencies including AWS Migration Consulting, for its shared emphasis on deep collaboration and its attractive price point. RS Group’s infrastructure included two data centers, several massive databases, thousands of servers, and a library of nearly 300 integrated or tightly coupled applications, both off-the-shelf commercial and developed in-house. And the company wanted a quick migration with as little downtime as possible. This was particularly true for the mission-critical applications behind its eCommerce platform, which generates 61 percent of the company’s revenue. After reviewing options based on Tech Mahindra’s in-depth assessment that accounted for interdependencies, the teams decided a single cutover for its digital production platform—to be completed over a weekend—was the lowest-risk route to the cloud.

In partnership with AWS Professional Services, Tech Mahindra partnered with the RS Cloud Competency Centre and Architecture teams to transform RS Group’s inflexible, monolithic infrastructure into a resilient, agile cloud-based environment. Over several months, Tech Mahindra worked with RS Group to produce an AWS-validated migration plan and timeline that included test cutovers to isolate AWS environments. This allowed infrastructure and application validation without impacting production. Once testing passed, the teams connected the platforms to RS Group's other systems, migrating applications to a bubble environment before the final production cutover. Using AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN), which automates time-intensive, error-prone manual processes, along with native application tooling, the teams were ready to migrate all workloads to AWS. The new build would both replicate and improve upon the capabilities of RS Group’s on-premises infrastructure. “Tech Mahindra and AWS Professional Services worked closely together, figuring out how to do this with minimal impact, risk, and cost, which was key,” said Golds.

AWS comprises much of the new infrastructure, which includes complementary databases, such as Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless, NoSQL, fully managed database to improve performance. With Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), RS Group can automatically scale its compute up or down based on demand, freeing the company from its formerly restrictive licensing model. All of this was incorporated into the RS Group-built AWS Landing Zone, which helps companies quickly set up a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on AWS best practices.

Migrations occurred nearly every weekend over a nine-month period, and the effort saw 1,400 servers hosting hundreds of apps moved. For the last production cutover, teams from RS Group, Tech Mahindra, AWS Professional Services, and other third-party service providers collaborated as one team to execute the migration of digital production services from start to finish. If something needed escalation, a cutover manager coordinated a central call where everyone logged in to understand what was happening and how they were moving forward. Not only did the teams successfully complete the final phase of its largest single IT transformation in RS Group in 48 hours, but they did so without any unplanned downtime. “The seamlessness of this migration is a testament to the level of detailed planning RS Group and Tech Mahindra conducted,” Golds said. “We wouldn't have gotten that, otherwise.”

Since its move to the cloud, RS Group has been able to scale and innovate while also improving its availability, performance, resilience, and cost efficiency. With increased resilience from multiple AWS Availability Zones, the company has expanded to more markets and locations. Even with this growth, RS Group has seen speed increase by 150 percent and availability go from 97.9 percent to 99.999 percent. Because the improved availability reduces required maintenance, the team sees the equivalent of more than five additional days of uptime per year. RS Group has also reduced the total cost of ownership by 12 percent, thanks to the ability to scale up or down on demand within minutes, as well as the elimination of data center licensing and maintenance costs. The company is further optimizing its cloud resources to realize even more reduction in TCO.

In the cloud, tasks such as service provisioning are faster and easier for RS Group’s technical teams—taking some processes from months to days. Today, RS Group can make a network change in two days—up to a 95 percent reduction compared to the two weeks the previous infrastructure required. “On premises, it would take us weeks or months to change or add infrastructure,” said Golds. “Now, it only takes minutes, hours, or days.” This has paved the way for continuous innovation, allowing RS Group to consistently develop new solutions with AWS services while Tech Mahindra provides support. In particular, RS Group seeks to innovate its information security, artificial intelligence, and automation capabilities on AWS.