Migrating Inter Cars Infrastructure to the Azure Cloud
Inter Cars
Using a Lift-and-Shift approach to quickly transfer their system to Microsoft's Cloud.
Inter Cars was looking for a solution, which guarantees maximum efficiency and flexibility, and also allows to lower the cost of maintenance in comparison to existing infrastructure. Selected cloud solution should also guarantee openness and cooperation between multiple systems, Inter Cars wanted also to have full control over tools they use.
Customer
Inter Cars
About Inter Cars
Inter Cars is Central and Eastern Europe’s largest distributor of spare parts for passenger cars, trucks and lories. The company also offers garage equipment (particularly car repair and service devices), motorcycle parts and accessories for tuning.
Project goals
- Preparing for and performing the migration of Inter Cars' existing infrastructure to the Azure platform.
- Installing and configuring operating systems and middleware components.
- Setting up parameter monitoring and system diagnostics in the new infrastructure.
Why Inter Cars Chose Azure
Azure’s reliability and scalability were the determining factors. This cloud platform offers 99.95% uptime, which gives Inter Cars uninterrupted system operation, access to continuous monitoring and 24/7 technical assistance. It also brings costs down, as the company only pays for the resources they actually need at any given moment.
"Microsoft Azure is a collection of puzzles which may be used to create any IT architecture required for a given implementation. For Inter Cars, the essential factors were data base environments and application systems with automatic scalability".
Certainly, we should not compromise security which remains our paramount priority – adds Jacek Zadrożny.
Azure makes it possible for Inter Cars to:
- Access to all system layers.
- Monitor performance of components.
- Change the architecture (e.g. to rebuild it into microservices).
- Adjusting the resources to the current system needs.
Project implementation
Inter Cars, Microsoft, and e-point cooperated to design a new infrastructure, preparing a 3-tier infrastructure model based almost completely on IaaS solutions (due to the specifics of the core system component). This included:
- A web server tier to handle communication with HTTP protocol (handling redirects, traffic logging, etc.).
- An application server tier for SAP Commerce (formerly SAP Hybris) in various roles and supporting middleware (e.g. Solr).
- A database tier.
After Inter Cars and Microsoft created the infrastructure, e-point installed and configured operating systems and the middleware components. Introducing configuration automation tools (such as Ansible) at this stage allows to maintain coherence between the production and the development environments. It also ensured fast implementation of changes.
Then monitoring and diagnostics tools have been deployed in the new infrastructure, tools supports system maintenance in the new environment.
Outcome
The migration took about 3 months; the Inter Cars system is now operating in an Azure infrastructure.
"Moving the system to Azure Cloud was Inter Car’s most efficient large-scale migration project. A solid proof of this efficiency is the fact that the migration work did not affect end users in any way and switching the system to a new equipment platform took place virtually unnoticed".
After the migration, the time required for change implementation within the infrastructure was cut from weeks to hours or even minutes. At the same time, the project helped establish new standards that will be applied when implementing other systems in Azure Cloud.
Project scope:
- Azure infrastructure design and creation
- Operating systems preparation
- Middleware preparation
- System installation/adjustment in the new environment
- Pre-production testing
- Enabling system accessibility for end users
Technologies used:
- Azure,
- SAP Commerce (former SAP Hybris),
- Debian,
- Apache,
- Tomcat,
- Solr,
- Ansible.
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