Since it was founded in 2005, the Moroccan company Prestigia has worked hand in hand with Premaccess. Having first asked it to run its IT hosting, it is now starting a new digital transformation alongside it, by migrating its infrastructure to AWS.
Prestigia offers charming and luxury accommodation around the world. Its website, Prestigia.com, is a B2C platform built from open source components (PHP, Go, MySQL, ElasticSearch, Redis, MongoDB). On this migration project, the Premaccess teams proceeded in two stages:
- They refactored and migrated this site with BAM (Build Automation Machine),
- They supported Prestigia as it scaled up on the AWS services.
Our table of contents
stage 1: refactor and migrate this site with bam (build automation machine)
stage 2: scale up on the aws services
Artificial intelligence, Machine Learning & personalised recommendations
stage 1: refactor and migrate this site with bam (build automation machine)
Refactoring and automation
“Refactoring” means rethinking the architecture and the way the client's business application code is delivered within it, in order to make the most of the native features of the Cloud. This approach takes longer to put in place than “lift and shift” or “replatform”. But over the medium and long term it makes it possible to cut the cost of using Cloud services drastically, and above all to offer the client innovative new services quickly.
Until then, the Prestigia site was hosted on a VMware cluster (private Cloud). Before starting its migration, the AWS experts at Premaccess therefore refactored the site architecture with the automation tool BAM (Build Automation Machine).
A 100% agile solution, BAM automates the various stages of a deployment on AWS. Starting from simple template models for each Tier of the infrastructure (network, security, compute power, database, Cache & CI/CD, etc), the devOps were able to deploy the application's various environments quickly and automatically.
In order to make the application “well architected”, compliant with the Cloud provider's standards, each component of the application was switched over to an AWS service.
The applications migrated to farms (AutoScaling Group) of Amazon EC2 virtual servers. This AWS technology offers scalable compute capacity, with elasticity in the number of machines in the cluster of each of the client's business applications. That keeps the platform stable when traffic goes up or down.
The MySQL database was moved to AWS RDS with multi-datacentre redundancy within the same region (multi-AZ). This managed service is provided by AWS for databases (mySQL / Postgres / SQL Server / Oracle).
MongoDB migrated to DocumentDB. Amazon DocumentDB is a fast, scalable, highly available document database service. Fully managed, it supports MongoDB workloads.
The mySQL and MongoDB databases were moved with the DMS tool in order to reduce downtime. On the Prestigia project, downtime was close to zero. The client's various databases run on AWS services that were designed to deliver 99.99% availability. They are replicated with several copies of the data in different AWS availability zones. Amazon therefore continuously monitors the health of the database instances and, in under 30 seconds on average, automatically fails over to a read replica in the event of a failure.
Backup was implemented with native RDS continuous backup and the EBS lifecycle features. A second migration should take place over the summer to move the databases supported by RDS to RDS Aurora Serverless.
Monitoring of the platform was carried out with Amazon CloudWatch. This AWS service collects metrics and logs from every resource. That gives visibility over the whole deployed system, and in particular the key metrics such as CPU and memory usage and all the metrics needed to ensure an optimal quality of service.
stage 2: scale up on the aws services
Once the migration was complete, Prestigia wanted to benefit further from the AWS services.Objectives: to go further still, make the user experience on its site easier and cut its costs as far as possible.
Cutting costs and load times
With that in mind, some of the site's transactions are now handled withAWS Lambda (Function as a Service by AWS). With this service, Prestigia pays only for the compute time consumed. No charge is incurred when the code is not running on that part of the site.
What is more, since the Prestigia.com site offers luxury accommodation around the world, it now serves different geographic zones. As a result, its traffic fluctuates constantly with the activity of the regions it is positioned on. Premaccess is currently working to optimise the page load speed of this site around the world. The aim is to make sure the site responds as quickly as possible everywhere and at the best price. “The value of the AWS services is that they let us handle the different traffic curves of our site, explains Youness Chraïbi (CEO Prestigia). We do not have the same traffic depending on the geographic zone, over the year, or even over the week. Our goal here is to be at the top in terms of performance and page loading. But also to pay only for what we consume.”
Artificial intelligence, Machine Learning & personalised recommendations
After two years of getting to know Amazon Web Service, Prestigia fully intends to innovate using the AWS service building blocks. Its next step will be to use Machine Learning.
When it comes to Machine Learning and AI, Premaccess always seeks to bring these clients back to a business use case. The key question is: “What is your need?”. For Prestigia, the idea will be to produce recommendations, and so guide its users during their searches.
With artificial intelligence, Youness Chraïbi wants to “humanise” the customer relationship. “We want to add an artificial intelligence strand in order to advise our clients even better. Our objective with AI is to have a more human relationship than with a chatbot.”
Depending on the way a visitor browses the site, Machine Learning will interpret their queries in order to offer them the most personalised user experience possible and a series of recommendations close to their interests.
The deployment of the Prestigia.com site on AWS is the very example of a successful engagement. During this migration, Youness Chraïbi carried on focusing on his core business, innovation in hospitality. And to put all of that in place on AWS, he found support with the experts at Premaccess.
They encouraged him to take a long-term view on AWS. To that end, they refactored and migrated this site with BAM (Build Automation Machine). That approach now allows him to cut the cost of using Cloud services, and gives him faster access to the innovative new services of this Cloud Provider (Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Internet of Things). Enough to open up new business models, and to grow this company further through digital.
So, if you too want to migrate your infrastructure to AWS, the Premaccess team is at your disposal. It will answer all your questions and support you step by step in your migrations or in the setting up of your new Cloud or digital infrastructure projects.
GOING FURTHER | Prestigia: delivering a smooth experience and an instant response time