Key Outcomes
Overview
Logistics company DB Cargo moves cargo with ease across Europe, but moving a key legacy application to modern technology presented some challenges. The company’s railcar production application was a mainframe-based monolith that was becoming expensive and difficult to maintain. DB Cargo wanted to migrate the solution to the cloud, but the company could neither do a simple lift and shiftnor take the time to rebuild the application.
Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), DB Cargo worked with DB Systel, the DB Group subsidiary that drives digitalization across the Group, to transform its application, migrating it piece by piece to AWS infrastructure. As a result, the company modernized its solution without interrupting customer operations and significantly reduced operational costs.
About DB Cargo and DB Systel
DB Cargo is the logistics arm of German rail company Deutsche Bahn and one of Europe’s largest rail freight operators. DB Systel is a wholly owned subsidiary of DB AG and the driver of digitalization for all Group companies.
Opportunity | Using AWS to modernize the PVG application for DB Cargo
DB Cargo sells, rents, or leases around 80,000 freight cars to transport goods and commodities for customers. However, Produktionsverfahren Güterverkehr (PVG), the company’s IT application that manages the production process of freight trains, was reaching its technical limits. Built on a mainframe system, the application was becoming costly and outdated, with a declining number of people who could maintain it. Because of PVG’s proprietary components, DB Cargo couldn’t adapt it to a new environment, and rebuilding the solution from scratch could have been time-consuming and risky.
As the operator of the PVG application, DB Systel—which provides IT support for the business units in the DB Group—chose to address the challenge by simultaneously migrating to AWS and transforming the application. It worked with DB Cargo to plan the project step by step. The company selected AWS to support the technical transformation of PVG because AWS provided the ability to incorporate the solution into a modern cloud experience with built-in tools for monitoring and alerting, automatic scaling, failover automation, and security.
Solution | Shifting PVG to scalable cloud technology on AWS
The first step in the PVG migration was to use an interface application server to replace certain pieces of the application system. In this step, DB Systel used AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload.
Next, DB Systel decoupled the PVG backend from the previous technology stack and migrated the application from Natural to Java for DB Cargo. As part of this phase, the company rebuilt PVG to use a relational database on Amazon Aurora, which provides high performance and availability at a global scale for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and DSQL. At the same time, DB Systel used AWS services to develop automatic delivery pipelines, implement fail-safes and failover automation, set up and harden security measures, and enable monitoring and alerting. “During the migration to AWS, we carefully evaluated and selected the services that perfectly fit the use case to maximize efficiency and compatibility,” says Tjark Heimsath, lead business engineer at DB Systel.
Scalability was of particular concern to DB Systel, so the company created a customized solution to scale user sessions. The solution used AWS Lambda, a service for running code without thinking about servers or clusters, and Amazon CloudWatch, an intelligent observability service that provides actionable insights across applications and infrastructure. The DevOps team at DB Systel worked with the AWS team throughout the cloud onboarding process. They focused on strengthening the solution and conducting reviews of the new security architecture to verify its compliance with DB’s operator specifications.
Outcome | Saving 60 percent on costs in a modern environment on AWS
By modernizing on AWS, DB Systel could reduce DB Cargo’s operational costs for PVG by 60 percent while achieving 80 percent usage-based scaling. The transformed application successfully went live on AWS within the planned timeline. “By migrating to AWS, we maintained technical stability while running our application in a modern cloud environment with automation and monitoring,” says Heimsath. “We also improved scalability and resilience, strengthened our security posture, and reduced annual operating costs.”
Additionally, DB Cargo saw concrete improvements in handling user sessions, which contributes to cost efficiency. The company also reduced technical debt by removing dependencies on proprietary components.
Using AWS, DB Cargo created a robust, scalable architecture for PVG, complete with security, delivery pipelines, and technical process management. This architecture makes it simpler to upgrade in the future. As a result, the company learned that even legacy systems can successfully be modernized and incorporated into a cloud environment.
By migrating to AWS, we maintained technical stability while running our application in a modern cloud environment with automation and monitoring.
Tjark Heimsath
Lead Business Engineer, DB SystelAWS Services Used
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