Transdev secures its place in the AWS Cloud

Transdev has decided to carry out a twofold change at the same time: the modernisation of its obsolete IT environments and the migration of these same environments to the cloud in a single journey. For this French transport company, which employs 100,000 people in 19 countries, IT is "more a support for the business than a core business", explains Gaël Esnis, Technical Director in charge of the Group's infrastructure. Digital technology is increasingly involved in operations, with tools for route planning, vehicle maintenance and spare parts management, as well as information for travellers. IT is also a key element in the development of our business. "Our fleet includes more and more electric buses, whose batteries are very vulnerable to climate change and repeated charging cycles", explains the Technical Director. Transdev is therefore developing applications to better predict the battery capacity and improve the management of vehicle use. "Even though our business is not highly computerised, it is becoming increasingly difficult to operate without it".

The Group began its move to the cloud in 2016, convinced that operating a data centre would become too complex and costly a task in the future. They also wanted to take advantage of this move to address the obsolescence of their servers, most of which were running Windows Server 2008, and their databases. "Rather than carry out a cloud migration project one after the other, followed by a second version upgrade project, we decided to simultaneously change the system and its hosting," continues Gaël Esnis. "This allowed us to reduce the impact on users and make savings that would help us to achieve a faster ROI". Transdev decided from the outset to use the AWS Cloud to carry out these two projects in one. "AWS was the leading player in the market, but above all it was the one that offered the largest range of services. So it was an easy choice."

The journey is taking place in two stages. A cloud-first strategy has been implemented throughout 2017 and 2018. New applications and major version upgrades are deployed directly in the cloud. Having taken these first successful steps, Transdev decided in 2019 to start moving its existing applications to the cloud. The process was nevertheless stopped in 2020 due to the pandemic. "On the one hand, it seemed more difficult to carry out this project with in-house teams and partners who were confined to their homes, and on the other hand, transport was one of the industries heavily affected by the crisis, and at the time we didn't know what the impact would be for the group. Projects that were not critical to the company's survival were therefore put on hold". The project was finally completed in 2022, involving more than 400 servers and around a hundred applications in France, representing around 30% of the organisation's IT assets worldwide.

"After the lockdown periods, 20 to 25% of our servers were already hosted on the AWS Cloud. This gave our teams time to learn about AWS environments, and in particular the automation tools, which enabled us to speed up a lot of things." The group uses Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS and Amazon S3 storage, Elastic Load Balancing load distribution or the Amazon Route 53 DNS service, but is also making the most of its move to the cloud to simplify and accelerate its operations with automation services such as AWS Service Catalog or AWS Systems Manager. Today, 30% of servers are automatically deployed, and Transdev is targeting automation for 100% of its servers by the end of 2024. "We have greatly improved our flexibility, both in the initial provisioning of servers and in the readjustment of resources. For instance, we can start up 60 servers to meet a need during the day and keep only 3 active overnight. Another example: one of our applications had a performance problem before migrating. Thanks to the flexibility of AWS Cloud, we were able to test this application on 6 or 7 different set-ups to find the best balance between performance and cost. It would have been impossible to do the same thing on premises, and we wouldn't have been able to achieve the same level of performance."

This flexibility has resulted in a much welcomed change in the way IT teams work. "The production teams no longer wanted to carry out hardware maintenance operations with little added value in the data center, so they were highly motivated to finalise this migration," recalls Gaël Esnis. "Power cuts in the data center, network induction problems and component failures in the machines don't happen every day, but every time they do, they are major constraints for the teams. All of this is now a thing of the past with AWS. Administrators can concentrate on higher value-added and more interesting tasks." The migration has also been of benefit to the organisation as a whole, through the modernisation of the infrastructure used. "We're moving from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2019, from 5-year-old processors to CPUs that are no more than 18 months old, and from storage that was 75% mechanical disks to a full SSD environment, i.e., storage composed entirely of much faster flash memory media. The whole chain is more efficient!" enthuses the person in charge.

And concerning the costs of this new model? "We are very careful when it comes to costs," replies Gaël Esnis. "We draw up a mini-business case for each application and re-invoice the cost of the servers to the managers of these applications. Each person knows how much the application is going to cost them over the year, and we keep to our predictions without ever having any unpleasant surprises." The CTO intends to continue his efforts to promote the use of the AWS cloud in more innovative areas, such as data. "We have 200 services at our disposal that can enable us to quickly get started with new technologies. I insist on training my teams in services that go beyond their current scope, such as Amazon SageMaker for machine learning, so that in the future they will be in a position to support our businesses in new use cases."

The Corporate IT Department manages over 70 AWS accounts, many of which are used by the French IT Department and by IT Departments in other countries. But it has no decision-making power when it comes to initiating an overall migration within these local teams. More than 50% of AWS services are currently used in France. "We have regular discussions between IT managers. All the other countries are aware of the move we've made, and when one of them wants to switch over, we'll be ready to support them in the process."