Customer Profile

BSE is Asia’s First Exchange and World’s Fastest Exchange with the Speed of 6 Microseconds.

Bombay Stock Exchange Limited is the oldest stock exchange in Asia, established in 1875. It is the first stock exchange in the country to obtain permanent recognition in 1956 from the Government of India under the Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act, 1956. It is widely recognised by its index, SENSEX.

The Exchange is professionally managed under the overall direction of the Board of Directors. The Exchange has a nation-wide reach with a presence in 417 cities and towns of India.

The Challenge    

BSE required hosting Paper trading application on cloud. This application is used by brokers, traders to test their algorithm trading strategies with live market data feed during market hours. The customers would require their instances on demand to run this application. A solution needed to be devised to automate this process of provisioning their application stack, and stop/terminate them when the end user wished to do so.

They were looking for a partner who could provision infrastructure on Amazon Web Services with the appropriate configuration in order to host the PT application and then support the deployment in form of Managed Services which will aim to resolve any issue related to infrastructure on AWS.

The Solution      

The BlazeClan team of certified SAs conducted an exhaustive study of the system and charted out a roadmap for deploying this application.

The team analysed that the Paper trading application is an internally used application using which members can test their algorithm trading strategies with live market data feed during market hours. The application has been developed by Symphony which is expected to be used by around 23 concurrent users.

• Users will perform actual trading on Paper Trading Application.
• User can perform either Paper Trading or Back Testing.
• Paper Trading clients (hosted on BT instances) will connect to Paper Trading application instance to perform trading.
• Symphony will implement the system to receive the real time Multicast data and send Unicast data stream to AWS.

BlazeClan worked with BSE to identify and map the application and identify dependencies and criticality to chart a road map to move the application to AWS.

DevOps Approach

BlazeClan helped BSE in adopting a DevOps approach for infrastructure automation. They created templates for deploying each component of the infrastructure making it more flexible and scalable.

Automation of Infrastructure Provisioning was primarily done with AWS CloudFormation in conjunction with other services like Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and Amazon VPC. It helped in reducing the time spent in managing infrastructure and resources so that it is easier to focus on the application.

The AWS CloudFormation Stack creation included creating security groups for the instances and opening of specific ports, as required by the application, launching of an instance with an AMI that contains the standalone third party application, in an existing subnet inside an existing VPC, and finally attaching an Elastic IP address to the EC2 instance.

AWS CloudWatch was used to monitor the performance of the system.

A web application that would make API calls to CloudFormation via web interface was developed using Go language to provide a seamless experience to the users. The User Instances was launched from a pre-configured AMI that has the standalone third party application.

DevOps flow diagram

 The Benefits      

1. Improved Performance: The application performance was improved by migrating them on AWS, giving traders the freedom to test their strategies 24/7 and in real time, thereby providing them greater agility.
2. Cost Savings: this engagement brought about massive cost savings as payments needed to be made only for actual usage.

Tech Stack

BlazeClan availed a number of AWS services to execute this project successfully.

• Amazon EC2 was used for compute capacity management for their application deployment. It helped in reducing the time required to spin up new server instances to minutes, allowing them to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as per their requirement.
• Amazon S3 was used to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere and everywhere.
• Amazon VPC helped in setting up the private network with AWS as it provided isolation and security.
• AWS CloudFormation was used in the production/development/UAT environment for mirroring purposes for automated deployments.
• Amazon Machine Image was used to spin new instances for creating infrastructure
• Go language was used for developing front-end of the application in combination with AWS CloudFormation templates.
• AWS CloudWatch was used to monitor the performance of the system.

Customer Profile

The customer is India’s fastest growing entertainment network of iconic brands offering multi-platform, multi – generational and multicultural brand experiences across television, film, digital media and LIVE events.

The Challenge    

The company hosted their SAP BI suite running in an on-premise environment. Given the changes in the company’s business environment, the teams wanted it to be migrated to cloud followed by upgrading the same in a time critical manner. Also, it was getting increasingly difficult to gain cost efficiencies while keeping a flexible, powerful system due to the hardware constraints of the private cloud environment.

Within this context, the company decided to look into using a public cloud as a way to take advantage of the inherent value of the cloud while optimising upfront and operating costs.

The Solution      

BlazeClan team of certified SAs conducted an exhaustive study of the system and charted out a roadmap for deploying this solution.

The team of certified SAs migrated the application in two phases:

1. Discovery of the existing architecture, assessing cloud readiness and designing of the AWS environment. This also included assistance in preparing the order management system cloud ready.
2. Implementation of the AWS environment, setting up IAM user management and authorization authentication as per the underlying best practices. This also included migrating the order management system to AWS and setting up Cloud Front to provide a better browsing experience. Implementation of the auto-scaling groups with ELB to make the existing order management system highly scalable and elastic in nature.

A number of recommendations were implemented that included:

• Memory Intensive Instances: SAP applications required memory-intensive instances for smooth working hence it was recommended to use memory-intensive instances at the time of deployment.
• Security groups were put in place to ensure robust cloud infrastructure.

The team consulted, architected, and deployed end to end infrastructure including compute, storage and networking for all the three environment including Dev., QA &Production and migrated the SAP application.

The Benefits      

• Cost Savings: BlazeClan helped the company in saving costs by successfully migrating their SAP application on AWS from on-Prem and timely upgrading it. They now have the ability to spin up the Dev. /QA instances during the course of the day and turn them off during night time and weekends, which wasn’t an option in their previous world
• Agility: migrating to the cloud helped them gain all the agility required to have a competitive edge  in their business.

Tech Stack

BlazeClan availed a number of AWS services to execute this project successfully.

• Amazon EC2 was used for compute capacity management for their application deployment. It helped in reducing the time required to spin up new server instances to minutes, allowing them to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as per their requirement.
• Amazon S3 was used to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere and everywhere.
• Amazon VPC helped in setting up the private network with AWS as it provided isolation and security.
• AWS NAT Gateway was used to allow instances in a private subnet to connect to the Internet or to other AWS services.

Customer Profile

The customer is the longest established travel company in the world. Its distinguished history began in 1758 when it was appointed as general agents to the regiment of Foot Guards in India under the command of Lord Ligonier.

Their worldwide offices are located in UK, USA, Japan, Russia, Singapore, and Dubai. It has associate offices in Germany, Italy, Spain, South Africa, Sweden and Australia.

The Challenge    

When the business said “go”, the customer had to find a way to be nimble. They had launched a Travel ERP program, known as Travelogix across the globe in 13 countries. This first of its kind ERP system was implemented using the below tech stack:

• Frontend Platform: .NET (In-house Product)/Sitecore as WEM
• Database Server: MSSQL DB, Mongo DB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle
• CMS: Sitecore
• CRM: Microsoft Dynamics CRM Integration
• Booking: Booking Engine (In-house Product)/MEAN Stack, JAVA Stack, Booking Engine, Operations, BRE Module Supplier Integration Stack (SOA)

With the continuous growth of the business, the client’s IT setup gradually started facing capacity issues. They also had many legacy applications running on-premise which they wanted to move to AWS and further re-architect them and make them cloud ready. The main focus over here was to reduce the time to delivery and make all the processes faster and simple in the entire organization.

The Solution      

1. Partnering with BlazeClan and leapfrogging to the cloud helped our client to differentiate in their very competitive industry. BlazeClan team provided cloud consulting services to create a complete application assessment and cloud migration strategy along with a proposed implementation plan and timeline.

In the plan, BlazeClan’s team of certified SA’s created a business case analysis, security risk matrix, and total cost of ownership and ROI calculations to provide an in-depth look how to move successfully on the cloud and realize opportunities for significant costs savings. The team charted out a roadmap for migrating 10+ applications under travelogix program to cloud. The team of certified SAs defined a 3 step strategy phases that included:

• Phase 1 – Assessment of the existing architecture and existing network and security configuration. Assessing tools to be used for application migration (VM Import/Export, Server Migration, Migration Tools) and to migrate the database (Database Migration Service, Replication Tools, Migration Tools), devising migration strategy to move application servers and database servers, migrating data onto AWS. Defining move groups for migration and network & security strategy.
• Phase 2 – Migrating the production environment onto AWS leveraging DevOps tools. Setting up AWS infrastructure. This also included refinement of IAM user management and authorization authentication as per the underlying best practices.
• Phase 3 – Migration was followed by managed services that included 24/7 monitoring and support, Application Monitoring, Database Monitoring, Incident Management, Housekeeping Activities and cost optimization.

The Benefits  

• High availability: Successful migration of applications from on-prem to AWS enabled the customer to take advantage of on-demand compute, scaling up and down as needed for the peak season without oversubscribed capital purchases.
• Improved Performance: The entire system was deployed in auto-scaling mode and hence the client was able to scale during peak time using the auto-scaling functionality of AWS.
• Cost Savings: This engagement brought about massive cost savings as payments needed to be made only for actual usage.
• Lower financial risk: BlazeClan team helped in reducing the company’s financial risk by moving from a CAPEX based to OPEX based. The customer is now utilizing the agility of the system by running dev. systems only for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.

Tech Stack

BlazeClan availed a number of AWS services to execute this project successfully.

• Amazon EC2 was used for compute capacity management for their application deployment. It helped in reducing the time required to spin up new server instances to minutes, allowing them to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as per their requirement.
• Amazon S3 was used to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere and everywhere.
• AWS NAT Gateway was used to allow instances on a private subnet to connect to the Internet or to other AWS services.
• AWS CloudWatch was used to monitor the performance of the system
• AWS Guard Duty was used for continuous monitoring purposes, to identify any malicious or unauthorized behaviour in order to protect their AWS accounts and workloads
• AWS Lambda helped in running the code without provisioning or managing servers.
• AWS Import/Export was used to address the challenges with large data transfers that result in high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns.

Customer Profile

Fraser & Neave Holdings Bhd (F&NHB) is a Malaysian company listed on Bursa Malaysia’s Main Board with expertise and prominent standing in the food and beverage business. F&NHB is amongst the region’s and Malaysia’s oldest companies and its brand enjoy the rare distinction of being a market leader and household name in many categories. F&NHB operates in Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand and Indochina, and is a subsidiary of Fraser and Neave, Limited, a company listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange.  A well-loved brand in Malaysia, today, F&NHB has spread its wings to more than 40 countries worldwide and established itself as a regional player.

The Challenge    

After over a decade of operation of traditional data centers, F&N business stakeholders faced a need for a more nimble and cost effective hosting solution. The decision was made to migrate to the AWS platform, and BlazeClan was selected as the consulting and migration services partner.

F&N was looking for cloud migration and complete transformation for business agility & cost benefits. They were looking for migration of 10+ on-premise applications and creating a plan to shut down one of their data centers by FY 2015. Business requirements included cloud advisory services, migration planning and short migration timeframe.

The Solution      

As part of this engagement, BlazeClan took a discovery-based approach for understanding their infrastructure, network, storage, application and other business processes. It was engaged with F&N and respective teams to identify and map the applications and identify dependencies and criticality to chart a roadmap to migrate all the applications from on-premise to AWS.

The teams worked through the design and implementation challenges that go along with migrating of applications to AWS, devised a migration strategy, and built the infrastructure in the new AWS environment using AWS EC2, Dynamo DB, CloudFront, ELB and S3.

BlazeClan’s team of certified solution architects have successfully migrated the applications from a traditional hosting facility to AWS, decommissioning one of their data center and providing them with the desired cost benefits. The team of certified SAs executed the migration plan in three phases:

1. Infrastructure discovery: this phase included architecting the environment and applying network level configurations, defining security groups, evaluating infrastructure gaps and providing recommendations.

2. Application discovery: The numbers of applications were identified for migration in this phase. These applications were majorly off the shelf products and were managed and maintained by third parties. Cloud readiness’s for these applications were evaluated and then appropriate changes were made to make them cloud ready.

3. Process discovery: in this phase, various monitoring tools like New-Relic, CloudWatch were implemented for application and infrastructure monitoring in a dynamic environment. The mechanism was put in place for integrating and tracking requests and issues.

The Benefits      

1. High availability: Successful deployment of these applications resulted in making them highly available in nature.
2. Scalability: The Company achieved the ability to scale the application as and when required along with granular level control of the environment.
3. Cost savings: Successful migration of its data center by BlazeClan helped F&N close its data centers in 2015, thereby saving up to 30% on existing IT operations cost.

Tech Stack

BlazeClan availed a number of AWS services to execute this project successfully.

• Amazon EC2 was used for compute capacity management for their application deployment. It helped in reducing the time required to spin up new server instances to minutes, allowing them to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as per their requirement.
• Amazon S3 was used to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere and everywhere.
• Amazon VPC helped in setting up the private network with AWS as it provided isolation and security.
• Amazon CloudFront integrated with other services accelerated the delivery of the content to the users in minimum time.
• Amazon DynamoDB provided a fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability.
• AWS Import/Export was used to address the challenges with large data transfers that result in high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns.