As Inveon, we provide consulting services to our clients about e-commerce software. In addition to providing implementation services related to software products to our clients, we also provide support for infrastructure services and management of the operation of multiple applications providing online sales services. We have a datacenter partner with whom we have been working with for a long time for infrastructure services and we serve our customers using this infrastructure. As Inveon, we have a staff of 110 people, most of whom are software developers and technical experts.
Some of the important applications that we offer to our clients work on on-premise IIS servers. These e-commerce-related applications are particularly affected by fluctuating campaign traffic and respond to different loads in different time periods. Until recently, we have been scaling these applications due to loads using very traditional methods. At this point, we implemented a project that will take advantage of the App Service offered by Azure to save labor and improve our service quality by modernizing traditional methods. With Azure App Service, we have solved both our scalability problems and modernized our testing structure, enabling different environments to be delivered in seconds.
This transformation has enabled us to shorten our business processes and save resources. In addition to automatic scalability in live systems, the development and test systems needed by our software development teams are quickly up and running, allowing us to focus on software development, which is the core area where we generate value.
Problem
Our website was receiving heavy traffic, and we were managing it with IIS accounts in existing local environments. The infrastructure needs of our websites were increasing and decreasing depending on the traffic. These changes were managed manually. We wanted to move to a cloud technology for all this manual management and tracking of constantly changing traffic, and handle this manual work and infrastructure by service procurement. Because Azure’s App Service provided us with a fully managed website model, it would allow for dynamic infrastructure changes, scalability, security, and rapid changes. In addition, we needed instant machines because we needed a lot of instant test environments. Thanks to Azure, it now takes us seconds to create a new environment.
Datacenter was running on physical servers with VMs running in a VMware environment. The datacenter service was being outsourced. Developers would send their applications to there.
When moving the website to Azure as Platform as a Service, all we needed was the source code of the application on the existing IIS machine. After publishing this resource in the Azure environment, our application was going to be able to go live without the need for any IIS. After that, the relevant certificate and DNS redirects would be made and the application would start working as production. What we needed was to focus on our applications using a managed service without dealing with the inftastructure layer.
Solution
Hosting the website using a platform service was our main requirement. In doing so, we wanted to be able to make changes ourselves easily and instantly, and we wanted to have full control of the environment in case we need something new. We did not want to deal with mandatory updates such as infrastructure and security updates. Thanks to Azure’s easy screens, we have seen that we can meet these needs together with a Proof of Concept study. We decided to use App Service, a PaaS service in Azure, as it was a platform that met our needs. It provides ease of operation. We do not have to follow it all the time.
Because of both Microsoft’s strong vision in this area and the fact that it is a platform that meets our wishes, we chose the Azure App Service, a proven service in the industry.
There were a few business partners who we knew had competence in this area. Among these business partners, we chose Data Market, with whom we had implemented successful projects in the past. Data Market is a company that has clearly defined its processes and proven its competence in application modernization. In this transformation, we drew a road map together and implemented our projects.
Benefit
- This product allowed us to focus only on the site without dealing with the infrastructure layer. Updating and ensuring the security of VMs running on the infrastructure are no longer our responsibility. We can focus on how we can make our product better only. When we need something new, we can easily handle it on our own, because the management portal is very easy to use.
- We can easily track our site metrics, health status, new versions, and many other features using the portal. The time we used devote to infrastructure management is now spent on thinking about how we can make the product perform better. For us, it has been both ease of use and saving time.
- Most importantly, this transformation has led to a reduction in our working hours. If we want to get a serious test environment up and running, or if we want to get a host running in a live environment, we can do it in seconds.We have reduced our inventory on the datacenter side with the closure of old resources. By getting more information about the cloud, we have enabled our IT team to improve themselves in this direction. We are working to adapt our application to new generation technologies. Data Market works with us at every step in this transformation and supports all our processes.
- My recommendation to companies that want to implement similar projects is to take advantage of new cloud technologies. You can get rid of unnecessary workloads and increase your productivity, as well as get to know the next generation of technologies. You can get information from Data Market, whose competence is really high in this field.
Technologies Used
We used Azure App Service Migration Assistant to perform the assessment. In addition, based on our existing metrics, we selected the appropriate App Service Plan in Azure.