Download Migrating from Rackspace to Amazon Web Services

Migrating from Rackspace to Amazon Web Services

ClearScale is experienced in over a dozen Rackspace-to-AWS migrations. For the many Rackspace customers who have a real business need to advance to Amazon Web Services, making the switch can seem overwhelming for a number of reasons: lack of experience with AWS, the inherent risk of a production migration, and the need for support. Indeed, migrating a cloud infrastructure is not a simple task, but the effort to migrate to AWS is worth it because of the superior technology, rapid innovation, and competitive pricing that AWS offers. In fact, customers often end up saving money on AWS.

ClearScale works to support our customers through the migration by first understanding their business needs and their current deployment on Rackspace. Then we map that over to corresponding services on AWS, architect new solutions on AWS that were not possible on Rackspace, deploy those solutions, test the solution in a mock cutover scenario, and then carefully move data from Rackspace and perform the final cutover to AWS.

Through ClearScale’s CloudNoc service, we are also able to manage the cloud infrastructure on the customer’s behalf. CloudNoc Managed Services offers monitoring, remediation, and complete management depending on customer needs. With AWS Support and CloudNoc, customers get more in-depth support and pay less than Rackspace managed services alone. RAX-to-AWS Case Study RAX-to-AWS Case Study Luxury Consumer Goods Manufacturer Celebrity Media and News Website

A luxury consumer goods manufacturer wanted to get ready for the The customer, a celebrity media and news website with highly variable holidays – their peak sales time – and needed to be able to scale their traffic that could spike dramatically with the release of hot new stories, ecommerce website to 10x current traffic. They were using Rackspace was using Rackspace RackConnect, Cloud, and Dedicated Servers Dedicated Servers, and in order to meet the potential demand spikes, with cloud management from RightScale. They were having stability they would need to lease even more servers from Rackspace. But the issues with Rackspace, and RightScale was not working well with increased expense of adding dedicated servers was not an option. Rackspace. Autoscaling was not working, and the customer was The on-demand pricing from Rackspace Cloud was attractive, but overpaying for unused dedicated servers and cloud. the team was not confident that the services available on RackSpace Cloud would meet their needs. They decided to migrate to AWS and put their entire website infrastructure in the Amazon Cloud. ClearScale helped the customer So they chose to move their ecommerce website infrastructure to stabilize and simplify their architecture. RightScale was replaced with AWS to enable them to autoscale and handle the holiday traffic cost- CloudFormation and OpsWorks, which reduced costs and simplified effectively and with the superior technology offered by AWS. the automation system. The physical MySQL servers were replaced with high performance RDS instances using Provisioned IOPS, which ClearScale helped the customer simplify their architecture. The cut costs while still meeting performance requirements. RackConnect complex Redis cluster was replaced by ElastiCache, and MySQL and the physical firewall were no longer needed because Amazon VPC servers were replaced by RDS to simplify management and cut costs. handled all networking requirements. Physical load balancers were The single-point-of-failure NFS server was replaced with ultra durable replaced with ELB at fraction of the cost. S3 and linked up to CloudFront CDN for ultra fast delivery. A secondary AWS Region was deployed for disaster recovery, and their whole The additional cost of RightScale was eliminated and hosting costs deployment was simplified and made cost effective by automating with were cut by 50%. ClearScale designed and executed the migration, CloudFormation and Chef. Amazon VPC helped meet PCI compliance and autoscaling now works as expected, uptime has improved, and requirements. the customer can scale to accommodate huge spikes when hot content is released. ClearScale designed and completed the migration and now the customer is ready well in advance of the holiday season – plus they were able to save 30% on their hosting costs as a bonus. AWS Stack VPC EC2 CloudFormation OpsWorks ELB RDS

AWS Stack VPC EC2 CloudFormation EBS RDS ELB CloudFront CDN Tech Stack PHP Apache Drupal MySQL

Tech Stack PHP Magento Apache MySQL Gluster Drupal Chef

The customer was using Rackspace Cloud to host their SaaS payroll ClearScale delivers best-of-breed cloud systems application. They were experiencing fast growth and wanted to scale. integration, application development, and Two key considerations were security and automation. The customer managed services. was also experiencing more than normal downtime on Rackspace. ClearScale’s longtime experience with AWS across hundreds of ClearScale helped the customer make the architecture more highly client engagements enables us to deliver successful cloud projects available and more scalable. The customer did not have load balancing for companies across all industries. Our core competency is and autoscaling in place, and this was addressed by using ELB, delivering custom cloud projects and services for clients who have CloudFormation, and Chef for automation. Furthermore, the customer limited cloud experience on staff or just need additional resources. had been running the application on the same server as the database, We leverage the best cloud technologies available to provide a so ClearScale decided to split this up into separate tiers and replace solution that is unique to your project requirements. That’s why MySQL with RDS. Amazon VPC and IAM were used to address the ClearScale is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. Whether this is customer compliance requirements. The previously manual application your first project in the cloud or one of many, ClearScale has the deployment process was improved by using Jenkins, Chef, and Git to expertise to handle your most complex requirements. establish a deployment and continuous integration system.

With the customer’s security, autoscaling, and automation requirements To learn more about migrating your addressed by ClearScale using AWS, the customer was also able to infrastructure to AWS, contact ClearScale at reduce costs by 35%. 1-800-591-0442 / [email protected] AWS Stack VPC IAM EC2 CloudFormation ELB RDS

Tech Stack Python MySQL PHP Nginx Unicorn Wordpress Chef Jenkins Git

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