Problem Description:
CityGrid enables local businesses to thrive: promoting their business and managing their presence across an abundance of review sites and search engines. They were running their Oracle Enterprise infrastructure across two physical datacentres, hosting production on the West Coast and a disaster recovery center on the East Coast. With Puppet automation already embedded into their processes, CityGrid’s main priority was to reduce costs.
Solutions Highlights:
Since their parent company, IAC, was moving to the cloud, a migration to AWS was a sensible economical move for CityGrid. AVM took responsibility for the migration of their core Oracle infrastructure, which stored essential content, GEO, and financial data.
We undertook a comprehensive analysis of the infrastructure, considering both native AWS solutions and third party options. We settled on EC2 instances with Oracle Enterprise installed, since AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) couldn’t support the Oracle Enterprise features.
Between AWS costs, Oracle licensing, and database performance, we wanted to strike a perfect balance in our solution. The Oracle installation within EC2 was fully automated, including most features of RDS, whilst maintaining sufficient licensing freedom. We adopted Oracle Data Guard for the migration, considering it the most viable, resilient, and cost-effective product for CityGrid’s stack.
For CityGrid it was one of the smoothest migrations the company ever performed. All environments – from development, QA, UAT, all the way to production – were migrated to the cloud, leading to the desired effect of reducing costs on the infrastructure.
