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Journey through our Migration to Cloud – Over 2 years later

Written by Tipico

We Maximise Spannung

This is a story of optimisations and improvements but also several lessons learned. Within 9 months from the decision to leave the traditional data centre, it was an all-in 100% datacentre migration in the week of 13th August 2018.

Our aim is to have smarter, simpler and safer solutions. We measured shorter response times, increased productivity when rolling out new features and overall increased stability of the environment. We proved that the system can run at higher performance and our capacity goals showed processing of twice more transactions at very stable response times. In the previous data centre, we saw spikes.. a lot of them, caused by unknown factors and you demand predictability and close to linear scalability of the system and we have it now.

The new environment incurs less incidents and shorter MTTR, beating our availability goals. The automation of monitoring allowed us to eliminate manual efforts, spending less time on call for our engineers. The time and money saved was spent on further innovation. We believe in investing in the growth of our employees, if they don’t feel comfortable with the environment and know its capabilities, the innovation is limited.

We can now release infrastructure releases when we want, on demand via an automated pipeline. Since the migration, we have delivered dozens of features which were waiting to be implemented – we can now meet the pace of product innovations.

However, we also faced obstacles along the way – there was an amount of “handling” the environment we needed to learn and tackle first. Such as, making technical changes to support the new way of working and learning how different components work from a business perspective. We value these challenges to help us learn and reach the solutions we are known for.

One surprising challenge was the cloud cost. The first costs forecast was pointing us to 60% over our goal. The initial cost of our first full month after migration (in September) was 30% higher than what we paid for, with the traditional datacentre. It took us half a year to break-even, and almost another half a year to be 30% cheaper. Simplicity and optimizations became a great focus for engineers and they could impact the company’s bottom line directly.

With this project as many others at Tipico, we work as #oneteam in a highly collaborative and agile environment to create technical solutions that push us forward. We believe in flexibility, adaptability and being hands on to constantly improve as much as we can – our different expertise comes together to share our passion and ultimately achieve our goal.

This is not just a migration; it is a transformation.

 

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