Problem with infrastructure: The entire infrastructure stack was built on the Rackspace and they wanted to move it to AWS. The client is an established leader in providing data analytics solution to government and laws enforcements agencies. With advancement is technology they wanted to explore the power of cloud. 

Proposed solution: An end-to-end migration strategy was designed and implemented by Texas AI in a phase wise manner. 

Phase-I: 

• Networking: As the data contains PII, it is important that a proper access system is design in terms of accessing the application and environments. Thus, a VPC’s were developed with public and private subnets to isolate web server and application servers. 
• Identity and Access: A VPN server was setup that allows developers to access the infrastructure making it difficult to access the setup for unauthorized users. Apart from that a strong IAM policies were created to give minimal required access. Periodic checks are performed to ensure the access rights are correct. 

Phase -II: 

• Leveraging services: AWS providers vast range of services that effectively improves the overall system. Texas AI has identified those and following are the list of it: 

• S3 – All the static documents/images/files were moved to S3 in order to improve storage on application servers. All the backup and logs were also shifted to S3-Glacier for cost-optimization. 
• SQL VS NoSQL: Some of the data stored in the database were un-structured thus a NoSQL database solution was proposed. Also, on-premise SQL-server was moved to AWS-RDS that effectively manages the backup/failover easily. 
• CICD: To effectively maintain code and deployment AWS-Beanstalk was used with auto-scaling. 

• Audits: As client deals with government bodies, regular audits are performed by third-party. Thus, multiple logs and alarms were set to ensure all regulatory laws are met without fail. 

Phase-III: 

• Certified by AWS: Texas AI managed infrastructure/application was audit by AWS and was awarded for following best practices. 

Phase- IV: 

• Continuous improvement and monitoring are on-going. As AWS launch new services regularly, Texas AI keep identifying ways to improve the infrastructure and applications.