Hosting Migration to AWS - UCL
Migration from an on-premise solution to AWS
Cost saving hosting solution
Higher Education partnership
Background
Zoocha worked with UCL to migrate their multisite Drupal 7 platform from an on-premise infrastructure solution to performant AWS Cloud hosting infrastructure. This work was largely carried out by our in-house DevOps team, offering AWS expertise as demonstrated through AWS Cloud Practitioner certification.
Key Challenges & Solutions
Key challenges during this migration included specific issues with routing, as UCL required a lot of traffic to continue to pass through their on-premise solution for legacy services. This meant that we were unable to simply switch traffic to the new AWS infrastructure. Using Cloudflare CDN, we were able to establish a routing solution that diverted the necessary traffic to either the on-premises or AWS infrastructure.
Our team also encountered security issues when syncing files and databases due to UCL’s own internal security processes, this was resolved through collaboratively creating a custom VPN that allowed us to progress with the sync to AWS.
Due to the mass of sites that needed to be migrated, our DevOps team created custom jenkins deployments in order to facilitate running Drush commands in parallel over hundreds of sites. This allowed us to reduce the effort involved by several hours for each deployment, as well as reducing the amount of manual work to be majority covered by automation.
In order to provide UCL with the capability to manage hundreds of platforms, Zoocha created a custom dashboard that operated as a command centre for managing hundreds of microsites. This resulted in easier deployments and enhanced control over the creation and editing of new multi sites.
Results
The bulk of delivery was completed against an 8 week timeline, with ongoing phases of delivery to ensure all 600+ microsites would be migrated across. Our team worked extensively to keep hosting infrastructure costs low, sharing resources and offering condensed databases wherever possible. This has resulted in significant cost savings for the University, as well as a more sustainable approach to hosting infrastructure.
The hosting / infrastructure that was initially provisioned for the UCL leveraged the AWS services available at the time (a highly available estate driven through AWS OpsWorks), and has evolved over this period through proactive maintenance and optimisation to the ZHP (Zoocha Hosting Platform).
