What was proposed:

In recent years, Elfa has undergone a series of transformations in its business, with a wide growth in its operations and performance in the market. With all this growth, digital transformation has also become a major challenge for the company. In this sense, in 2020 the company decided to start a path of complete migration of its technology operations to the public cloud. Previously, the entire IT infrastructure was dispersed in multiple locations, with decentralized management, making the challenge of growth even greater. Thus, the project started with a deep process of strategy building and evaluation of market solutions, as well as, choosing the ideal partners to implement the project. With the choice of AWS and Valcann, the entire project was conducted with the scope of:

• Map and model the entire technology architecture;

• Propose technical migration scenarios;

• Conduct a capacity planning and infrastructure dimensioning study;

• Optimize systems architectures and business applications;

• Migrate dozens of Windows Servers

• Migrate SQL Servers databases;

• Migrate vertical business applications;

• Predict backup and disaster recovery strategy;

• Migrate TOTVS Protheus business application;

• Provide specialized support in cloud computing architecture and technology operation.

Technical enablement

The main challenge of Elfa Medicamentos' project was the readjustment of the architecture of the TOTVS Protheus application. The topology of the Protheus application is divided into 4 main blocks: frontend layer (client), load balancing layer (application server), data model layer (application server), database layer (SQL Server). In the case of Elfa, the migration was not just a manual rehost process, but it was necessary to redesign and reconfigure the entire application infrastructure. Previously, they had few application server nodes, which created a bigger bottleneck and single points of failure in the environment. Valcann carried out a comprehensive study to re-evaluate the best application architecture.

AWS Services deployed: 

• Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon EFS, Amazon GuarDuty, AWS CloudTrail, CloudEndure.

Customer issues and concerns that have been overcome:

1. Operational excellence

1.1. Implementation of continuous monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch;

1.2. Integrated connectivity with high available multi zone (Multi-AZ);

2. Security

2.1. Implementation of Amazon GuardDuty for intelligent monitoring of infrastructure perimeter;

2.2. Restriction of external access to the environment, with segregation between private and public subnets for back and front end, respectively;

2.3. Access to the AWS environment for VPN-only administration;

2.4. Encryption of data at rest and in transit.

3. Reliability

3.1. Multiple instance nodes, making it possible to balance reading and writing operations;

3.2. Minimal failover between nodes;

3.3. Using Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to implement snapshot-level backups.

3.4. Automatic backups of the database layer;

4. Excellence in performance

4.1. Calculation of expected environment demand for rightsizing.

5. Cost optimization

5.1. The monitored environment, with a continuous flow of monitoring for rightsizing.

Third-party solutions applied:

• • TSPlus: Remote Terminal Service;

  • SonicWall UTM: Firewall and VPN connectivity;

  • Hashicorp Terraform: Infrasctructure as Code;

  • Hashicorp Vault: Secrets and key management service.

Project schedule:

Project Start: October, 2020

Projet End: March, 2021

Key Results:

• • AWS managed infrastructure service;

  • Professional managed services provided;

  • 99.97% availability of the environment;

  • 39% increase in the scope of project workloads, due to the growth of the client's operations;

  • Improvement of 11 minutes (from 59 minutes to 48 minutes) in the integration response time between the TOTVS application and the vertical business systems.

Lessons learned:

• • The implementation of AWS services, allowed us to focus more on the business aspects of the project;

  • Although the planning of projects like this is important, the need for experimentation on the part of the client proved to be fundamental. In this sense, the use of AWS enables a rapid prototyping of architectures;

  • Using the AWS Well-Architected framework as a reference helps us to make clear to the customer the value of a good service partner.