Migration Project to Facilitate Datacenter Exit for Trader Interactive

Location

Global

Industry

Client

Trader Interactive is the leading provider of digital solutions that connect buyers, sellers, and renters in the powersports, recreational vehicle, aircraft, marine, commercial vehicle, and heavy equipment industries. Trader Interactive offers a broad portfolio of marketplaces that reaches over 10 million monthly unique visitors, as well as unique tools and insights to help dealers more effectively run and grow their businesses.

Challenge

Following a recent acquisition, Trader Interactive was looking to migrate their infrastructure to AWS cloud to optimize infrastructure costs and achieve a more robust backup and disaster recovery capability. AWS was chosen as the leading public cloud platform whose advanced capabilities best supported Trader Interactive’s technology strategy and business objectives.

The systems running in the datacenter supported multiple online marketplaces for a diverse range of vehicles and equipment. These applications had many custom configurations that needed to continue running once the migration was completed. Some of them also leveraged specific highly customized legacy technologies (e.g. Informix databases). This necessitated additional expert investigation and due diligence to ensure that, once those workloads were migrated to the cloud, post-acquisition commitments to the business could be met.

DataArt had worked on a number of other technology projects for Trader Interactive in the past. As an AWS Advanced Consulting partner with a strong track record in cloud transformations, the customer felt that DataArt was the right cloud expert to deliver this challenging migration.

Solution

Due to time constraints imposed by the datacenter exit deadline, the “Migrate-Then-Modernize” approach was adopted, with rehosting as the primary strategy to maximize speed and minimize changes to application architecture and code. Through the automated discovery exercise performed by DataArt at the start of the project, the team built the inventory of existing application servers, databases, and data servers, as well as the network topology. DataArt’s architects then proposed a target cloud architecture.

Based on the existing technology stack, the joint Trader Interactive / DataArt technical team selected the following key tools to enable the migration:

CloudEndure (now AWS Application Migration Service), a service that simplifies, expedites, and automates migrations from physical, virtual, and cloud-based infrastructure to AWS
DataSync, a secure, online service that automates and accelerates moving data between on premises and AWS Storage services
Informix-native tools (Informix databases were migrated in conjunction with a successful upgrade to a newer version, leveraging AWS Marketplace images for Informix instances)

Following the customer requirements, DataArt engineers also designed and implemented live backups and custom restore automation scripts. The backups leveraged the Amazon EFS service. At an agreed time, DBs were stopped, and data was migrated and restored using custom scripts. The servers were migrated to VPC in AWS using CloudEndure.

CloudWatch advanced monitoring was installed and enabled for each infrastructure component after the initial Cloud Endure sync. Trader Interactive continued to measure with custom RAM metrics that migrated with the rest of the system. Alerting with alarms set up for the cloud operations team was implemented. As part of the “Migrate-Then-Modernize” approach HAProxy was implemented, and several health checks were also configured to monitor server availability.

Following extensive testing and validation in the lower environments on AWS, the migrated workloads were ready for go-live.

Outcomes

The migration was executed successfully and on an aggressive timeline. Following the cutover from on-premises servers to the new AWS environment, some additional configurations had to be created quickly, as certain custom configurations were missed during initial testing. Even with that extra stabilization period, in a matter of days the system was safely running in production in AWS cloud, and the customer was able to turn off all physical servers in the datacenter, meeting the original business objectives.

With a robust, performant, resilient portfolio of key applications running on the AWS platform, Trader Interactive is now able to modernize their systems further, leveraging more native AWS services over time and enhancing automation for greater agility and operational efficiency, increasing customer satisfaction, and improving user experience for its customer base.

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