Customer Challenge

Lovia’s retail infrastructure was running in an on-premises data centre, but their hardware was aging, compute power was strained and they were running out of storage capacity. This was putting pressure on their batch processing jobs, which were in danger of overflowing the time allocated to them.

Facing the prospect of significant hardware expenditure, Lovisa needed to find a cloud provider with global reach, and support for future growth, reliability and performance. Another critical factor was the availability of tools to make the migration seamless, as well as the ability to utilise the existing investment in Microsoft Licenses in the cloud environment.

Fitzroy IT - The Perfect Partner

As an Advanced Consulting and Well-Architected Partner with a specialisation in Microsoft Windows Migrations, Fitzroy IT was perfectly placed to design Lovisa’s cloud infrastructure and lead all phases of the migration.

But the main reason that Lovisa chose to engage with Fitzroy IT was its friendly, dedicated and on-call staff, who are experienced with large-scale migrations and all the associated activities, from analysis and pre-planning and discovery, through to execution and testing for customer acceptance.

Fitzroy IT proposed a migration plan to move Lovisa’s operations into the AWS Cloud with minimal disruption. As part of the migration, right-sizing of all servers was undertaken to ensure the perfect balance between performance and cost-efficiency.

The migration took place over four separate stages and the enormous amount of pre-planning undertaken meant that the process was extremely smooth. performance testing carried out post-migration indicated that the batch processing jobs were, on average, 65% faster than the on-premise hardware.

Why AWS

As an Advanced Consulting and Well-Architected Partner with a specialisation in Microsoft Windows Migrations, Fitzroy IT was perfectly placed to design Lovisa’s cloud infrastructure and lead all phases of the migration.

But the main reason that Lovisa chose to engage with Fitzroy IT was its friendly, dedicated and on-call staff, who are experienced with large-scale migrations and all the associated activities, from analysis and pre-planning and discovery, through to execution and testing for customer acceptance.

Solution

With nearly 30 servers, connecting to Head Office and hundreds of stores in more than 20 countries around the world, the migration plan adopted by Lovisa needed to include minimal downtime and the ability to thoroughly test servers after cutover.

Utilising their experience running OLAs, Fitzroy IT ran a multi-week assessment and planning phase looking at Lovisa’s on-prem infrastructure and networking in detail. This provided a solid foundation for all of the subsequent migration works. Fitzroy IT also ran many workshops with Lovisa to dive into their environments and document the dependencies relating to the migration that had previously never been documented.

Lovisa’s AWS infrastructure was built using infrastructure-as-code and numerous AWS services were utilised to create a well-architected environment, including Network and Application Load Balancers, EC2 Dedicated Hosts, Transit Gateway, NAT Gateway and CloudWatch Dashboards.

After taking into considerations server configurations, loads and store opening hours across 20+ time zones, the migration of the servers was split into four separate phases, beginning with a proof-of-concept migration of a single region. Extensive testing was done to ensure that the latency on the DirectConnect link was low enough to support a hybrid cloud model with servers hosted in AWS, on-premise & other cloud providers.

After the successful proof-of-concept, AWS Migration Factory was utilised to move live machines to AWS and keep them synchronized to prevent data drift until the agreed cutover time. Each server had a detailed cutover & testing plan, much of which was scripted or automated to ensure that the outage period was kept to a minimum.

During the cutover process Fitzroy IT also worked with a number of external vendors to ensure configuration updates happened in a timely matter within the cutover window.