About the customer
Loyalty Partner GmbH, based in Munich, is a management holding company whose subsidiary Payback GmbH operates the Payback bonus program. Another subsidiary, Loyalty Partner Solutions, handles the BahnCard customer card with the bahn.bonus and bahn.bonus comfort programs, as well as Deutsche Lufthansa AG's Miles & More program. Payback manages customer data from partner companies, which the latter can use for marketing purposes or to check the effectiveness of advertising, for example.
Loyalty Partner Solutions offers the following services: consulting, development, implementation, and operation of customer management solutions, as well as the handling of complex CRM processes. The industry focus is on retail, travel, and transportation.
Challenge
In mid-2017, an Oracle Exadata solution was implemented in the on-premises data center to process very large amounts of data in extremely short time frames. At the end of 2018, it was decided to terminate the data center in 2020. One of the possible options was to migrate the application to the cloud. In addition to Azure and Oracle, it was decided to set up a test environment in AWS.
The aim of the test phase was to determine whether the very high performance values of the physical Oracle Exadata solution could be achieved with AWS technologies. After a successful test phase, the subsequent migration to AWS was to take place. In the event of a negative result, the application would have to continue to be operated in a physical data center.
The implementation
In collaboration with the customer, PROTOS Technologie GmbH designed a test environment that met the customer's requirements. Due to the complexity, it was not possible to refactor the landscape. The focus was on the performance values in the Oracle database. The use of i3 bare metal instances utilizing NVME storage (Instance Store), an optimized Linux operating system for Oracle, and various performance optimizations in the database module ultimately led to the desired result.
The NVME is preheated after a possible restart of the instances and reinitialized using a dump file. All read processes are outsourced to the NVME storage; only write processes use EBS volumes, which are provided as stripe volumes on the servers. This design made it possible to achieve the performance values of the physical Oracle Exadata solution.
The associated Siebel environment, consisting of several individual applications, was also initially migrated in a lift-and-shift scenario. Existing physical F5 load balancers were replaced with AWS Application Load Balancers. All Siebel application servers required Active Directory Services. These were mapped using AWS Standard Active Directory Services, including a necessary Active Directory schema extension for the Siebel applications.
The previous classic Windows File Server solution was replaced by the AWS service FSx for Windows. End-to-end encryption of all communication relationships within the Oracle Siebel environment, which was not available in the on-premises environment, was also implemented during the test phase. Based on the performance values achieved, the successful implementation of end-to-end encryption, and the successful provisioning of the entire Siebel application environment, the decision was made in mid-May 2019 to migrate the environment to the AWS environment.
Result
The migration of the productive environment from the previous on-premise data center began in early July 2019 and is expected to be completed by December 2019. The integration of AWS services such as Managed Active Directory Service, FSx for Windows File System Service, Application Load Balancer, Auto Scaling Groups, and S3 storage will significantly improve the availability of the individual application layers.
The previous application design was very static, but the use of AWS services now allows dynamic scaling without increased effort. Internal IT security and compliance are also optimized through real-time change and event monitoring using AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, AWS CloudWatch Event Rules, and AWS System Manager. The newly implemented end-to-end encryption of the entire application landscape also plays a decisive role in this.
