KDDI focuses on mobile and Internet services in Japan under the philosophy of "contributing to the development of an affluent communications society.” In addition to the relationship with AWS as a user of cloud services, we also collaborate with AWS on business aspects such as providing AWS Wavelength which enables the construction of ultra-low latency applications within au's 5G network.

KDDI's migration to AWS this time is for the platform of its "Data Storage Service" provided to au users. Data storage service is a storage service for photos, videos, address books, calendars, etc. taken with smartphones. au Smart Pass / au Smart Pass Premium members can use up to 50GB and non-members can use up to 1GB.

The data storage service which has operated in an on-premises environment since launching year of 2012 was required to optimize server and storage resources as the number of users increased. Mr. Takamitsu Katayama of the Engineering Division, Application Engineering Department said,
“The amount of data in photos and videos has increased dramatically due to the increasing sophistication of cameras. In the on-premises environment, servers and storage have been expanded about twice a year, but it was difficult to calculate the required capacity and the operational load was increasing. Therefore we have decided to migrate to cloud services to enable flexible resource expansion, optimize storage costs, and improve customer experience through enhanced performance."

For cloud services, AWS was selected based on a comprehensive evaluation of serverless and container services that provide high resource efficiency, managed services that enable fundamental cost improvements and the ability to balance performance and cost through automatic scaling.

Mr. Kensuke Tsukishima, Vice President, Engineering Division and Vice President, Technology Strategy & Planning Division said, "The deciding factor in adopting AWS was that we managed to see the technical value and cost benefits in the planning phase through the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) of migration support program. The PoC with AWS Snowball Edge convinced us that we managed to achieve the migration of 25PB of data, which we initially thought was impossible."

The project to migrate to AWS began in October 2018. The trials for the 25PB data migration using AWS Snowball Edge took place from May to July of 2019, with the data migration piece from August to July of 2021.

AWS Snowball Edge is a service that stores data in a dedicated physical appliance and transports it to AWS. In this case, the company used 18 AWS Snowball Edge units per cycle for the migration which was repeated for 14 cycles (252 total).

For the data migration, we prepared 18 units per cycle including two spare units for two sets of 18 units for a total of 38 units and operated the two cycles in parallel. To speed up the data transfer from the on-premises environment to AWS, Snowball Edge in-memory processing was also implemented and helped improve throughput.

“As a result, we were able to reduce the data transferring time to AWS Snowball Edge to be around 40 days per cycle and migrate 25 PB of data in about two years. During the migration, we also worked closely with the Technical Account Manager (TAM) on AWS' enterprise support team and received feedback as appropriate on potential enclosure failures, migration progress, and how to proceed. Thanks to this, we were able to proceed with the project without anxiety and shorten the construction period" said Katayama.

The new platform for data storage services was released in two phases in April 2019 and August 2020. In Phase 1, where the system was migrated from on-premises, AWS Lambda enabled event-driven thumbnail generation in a serverless manner in addition to system migration by lift. In Phase 2, we shifted to a cloud-native architecture by moving the DB from Amazon RDS to Amazon Aurora and the container execution environment from Amazon EC2 to AWS Fargate.

At the end of Phase 2, we have worked to optimize costs and introduced Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering, a tiered storage service in March 2021.

"With features such as the ability to automatically move data that has not been used for a long period of time to a more cost-effective tier, we were able to curb the ever-increasing costs of Amazon S3 and migrate to AWS without sacrificing the customer experience. We were able to reduce our storage operating costs by about 50%. As new storage tiers are being updated and usage fees are being lowered, we would like to take advantage of this to improve our cost efficiency. “ said Katayama.

The migration to AWS has ensured scalability and flexibility to handle an ever-increasing number of users and data. Storage costs which account for the majority of system operations, it has been reduced by approximately 50% and contributing to a reduction in TCO. We no longer have to scale up or down servers or spend lead time adding storage capacity which is our biggest concern," said Tsukishima.

The serverless and managed services have also greatly reduced the operational burden. Mr. Nobutaka Suzuki as Engineering Division, Department manager, Application Engineering Department said, "As a result, we were able to shift engineering resources to the development of new services which led to the release of the “Data Moving Service.” Engineers are more motivated and there is more momentum to actively take on the challenge of DevOps style development"

We plan to continue our efforts to modernize and make our systems cloud-native in order to optimize costs and enhance operational sophistication as well as to maintain and improve service quality. “We see potential in a multi-region architecture that leverages the Osaka region of AWS to improve service quality. We expect AWS to continue to provide new services and help us reduce costs," said Suzuki.

The Engineering Division of the Technology Management Head Office who is responsible for the maintenance and operation of the entire telecommunications service stated that the know-how gained through from this migration will be also horizontally deployed to support mission-critical services.

“We aim to provide high quality services by realizing a hybrid environment, utilizing on-premises and cloud computing in the right places at the right time. We would like to build a good relationship with AWS while maintaining a cooperative structure," said Tsukishima.

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