applications Archives

Why You Need AWS Consulting Services for Your Digital Transformation

Organizations are looking to leverage the power of cloud computing to create new digital business models and drive operational efficiency. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the leading cloud computing platforms that help companies become more agile and cost-efficient to deliver on business objectives and priorities. As companies embrace cloud adoption for more reliable, cost-effective, and secure storage solutions, investing in AWS consultants has become a crucial part of the process.

AWS cloud services provide a tremendous opportunity for business development and growth, especially when combined with a reputable cloud consultant. AWS cloud computing allows organizations to safely and securely store vast amounts of data while ingesting and processing that data to make it actionable. It also enables IT teams to increase scalability and capability quickly and efficiently, so businesses can stay ahead of their competition.

A cloud consultant experienced in working with AWS cloud technology can ensure that cloud strategies align with organizational needs, providing tailored solutions for maximum innovation and profit potential. By utilizing cloud computing consulting services from AWS, businesses can leverage cutting-edge cloud solutions to drive competitive advantage.

Working with AWS consultants like 2nd Watch can help your organization harness the technology that AWS offers, modernizing your business operations and transforming your IT infrastructure to solve your business challenges and hit critical business goals.

What is AWS Consulting?

AWS consulting services offer businesses a range of solutions and expertise to facilitate your organization’s success with cloud migration and in-cloud processes. These services include advising on best practices, migrating existing applications, building new applications, and optimizing overall performance. AWS consultants are highly experienced professionals who have a deep understanding of the AWS platform and provide invaluable insights into how it can be used within an organization to support digital transformation.

The value of working with these experts is that they understand the complexities of managing AWS’s infrastructure, cloud-native solutions, database services, and developer tools. AWS consultants analyze an organization’s existing setup and recommend practices for improved efficiency, scalability, security, cost optimization, reliability, and other aspects of their cloud environment. For example, they can help to ensure that an organization’s environment is properly configured and securely managed, so data remains safe and accessible to users. They can also provide expert guidance on which additional resources may be needed for more robust performance.

The Benefits of Working With an AWS Consultant

The main goal of any AWS consultant is to help businesses make the most of their investments in AWS products and services. This includes helping them choose appropriate services (such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, or Amazon RDS,) providing advice on configuring their environment correctly, ensuring their applications run efficiently in the cloud, and optimizing costs by scaling up or down resources as needed. Moreover, AWS consultants can help set up automated processes, such as deploying new versions of software or monitoring performance metrics. Most importantly, they can also offer advice on security best practices when working with sensitive information in the cloud.

By taking advantage of an experienced AWS consulting team, businesses can benefit from numerous advantages, including reduced costs, improved performance, scalability, and flexibility. With a tailored approach, organizations can positively impact their bottom line by leveraging the right combination of services and resources offered by AWS, such as compute power, storage capacity, database solutions, content delivery networks (CDNs), analytics tools, and machine learning capabilities, among others.

Working with an AWS consultant will improve performance by quickly spinning up new resources and scaling their existing infrastructure as needed without worrying about additional hardware or software investments. Additionally, AWS consulting teams will assist with migrations and optimization processes so that businesses can ensure their operations are running smoothly with minimal disruption or downtime.

Investing in an Experienced Team

When it comes to leveraging cloud computing platforms like AWS, organizations need to invest in an experienced team that understands both the technology as well as the business objectives of the organization. Good consultants should provide best practices while understanding the strategies that will work best for an organization’s specific needs. Organizations will increase their chances of success and ROI with the cloud when they invest in an experienced team.

Partnering with the right experts will maximize the opportunities and services offered by AWS.

Companies can learn how to utilize AWS database services better and develop tools that meet their IT and business objectives. This can help businesses optimize their IT infrastructure while reducing capital expenditures, which will maximize profit potential. Through AWS consulting, organizations have access to cloud-based solutions that allow them to run their applications faster, scale easily and cost-effectively, increase security, provide insights into customer behavior and create innovative products. Ultimately, beyond the technical aspects, AWS consulting can help organizations achieve peak performance both operationally and financially.

Conclusion

Harnessing the power of AWS provides businesses with many benefits, including cost savings, improved performance, scalability, and flexibility. However, these benefits can only be realized if you have an experienced team guiding your transformation efforts. Investing in a qualified AWS consulting team allows organizations to take full advantage of this technology while ensuring that their operations remain secure and compliant with industry standards. Having access to experts who understand both your business objectives as well as how best to leverage this technology will give you peace of mind knowing that your transformation project is being handled correctly from start to finish.

2nd Watch employs a cloud transformation framework and methodology for every engagement guaranteeing quality, consistency, and completeness. We start by listening to identify and strike a balance between innovation, self-sufficiency, risk, and cost. We then work with you to determine where you are in your cloud journey and assemble a tailored bundle of services to meet your IT business objectives.

We have been recognized by AWS as a Premier Partner since 2012 and as an audited and approved Managed Service Provider for our outstanding customer experiences, the depth and breadth of our products and services, and our ability to scale to meet customer demand. Our engineers and architects are 100% certified on AWS, holding over 200 AWS certifications.

Data Warehousing

Snowflake offers powerful features in the data warehousing space that allow 2nd Watch delivery teams to stay laser-focused on business outcomes. They use innovative technologies that optimize your data for storage, movement, and active use (cloud computing). They also have an ever-increasing array of valuable tools that significantly improve an organization’s ability to enrich and share large amounts of data with other companies.

But it doesn’t happen by magic…

2nd Watch can leverage our vast industry and technical experience to create a data warehouse for your organization that provides a fast, accurate, and consistent view of your data from multiple sources. Using best practices and well-established methodologies, 2nd Watch combines data from different sources into a centralized repository, creating a single version of the truth and a unified view.

The final design contains a user-friendly enterprise data warehouse that connects with both legacy and modern business intelligence tools to help you analyze data across your organization. The data warehouse is optimized for performance, scaling, and ease-of-use by downstream applications.

Potential Deliverables

Conceptual and physical data models for dimensional and analytical systems
Deployment of three semantic layers for tracking data in a central hub (raw, business using data vault, and data warehouse optimized for visualizations)
Design and development of departmental data marts of curated data
Training of end users for the cloud-based data solution and critical data applications and tools

Data Integration

Snowflake has a lot of flexibility when it comes to the data integration process, meaning Snowflake’s Data Cloud allows companies to go beyond traditional extract, transform, and load data flows. With the Snowflake ecosystem, companies can leverage data integration solutions that do everything from data preparation, migration, movement, and management, all in an automated and scalable way.

The consultants at 2nd Watch will partner with you every step of the way and guide the entire team in the right direction to meet your decision-makers’ specific goals and your organization’s business data needs. These are some of the popular data integration tools and technologies that 2nd Watch can help integrate to Snowflake:

Azure Data Factory
AWS Glue and Lambda
Google Cloud Data Fusion
Fivetran/HVR
Etlworks
IBM DataStage
SnapLogic
Plus, all the classics, including SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and Informatica

Potential Deliverables

Integration of any number of sources to a centralized data hub
Establishment of a custom system that operates well with niche sources
Speeding up the ingestion process and increasing the auditing power
End-game integration to a data warehouse and other target systems

Data Modernization

Snowflake is a paradigm-shifting platform. Micro partition storage, decentralized compute, and cross-cloud sharing opens up new opportunities for companies to solve pain in their analytics processing. Our consultants at 2nd Watch are trained in the latest technologies and have the technical expertise to tackle the challenges posed by making your legacy systems “just work” in modern ecosystems like Snowflake.

Using supplemental tools like dbt or sqlDBM, this process will transform your data platform by eliminating complexities, reducing latency, generating documentation, integrating siloed sources, and unlocking the ability to scale and upgrade your existing data solutions.

Potential Deliverables

Migration to Snowflake from existing high-maintenance deployments
Refactoring, redesigning, and performance tuning of data architecture
Deploying Snowpark API for integrating with Scala or Python applications
Supporting modern tool selection and integration

Data Governance

Data governance is critical to organizations hoping to achieve and maintain long-term success. Snowflake offers outstanding features such as object tagging or data classification that improve the security, quality, and value of the data. Additionally, when you work with 2nd Watch, we can help your organization establish a data governance council and program.

2nd Watch will assist you in identifying and coaching early adopters and champions. We will help with establishing roles and responsibilities (e.g., business owners, stewards, custodians), as well as creating and documenting principles, policies, processes, and standards. Finally, we will identify the right technology to help automate these processes and improve your data governance maturity level.

Potential Deliverables

Data governance strategy
Change management: identification of early adopters and champions
Master data management implementation
Data quality: data profiling, cleansing, and standardization
Data security and compliance (e.g., PII, HIPAA, GRC)

2nd Watch will make sure your team is equipped to make the most of your Snowflake ecosystem and analytics tools, guiding the entire process through deployment of a successful initiative. Get started with our Snowflake Value Accelerator.

Mind the Gap! The Leap from Legacy to Modern Applications

Most businesses today have evaluated their options for application modernization. Planned movement to the cloud happened ahead of schedule, driven by the need for rapid scalability and agility in the wake of COVID-19.

Legacy applications already rehosted or replatformed in the cloud saw increased load, highlighting painful inefficiencies in scalability and sometimes even causing outages. Your business has likely already taken some first steps in app modernization and updating legacy systems.

Of the seven options to modernize with legacy systems outlined by Gartner, 2nd Watch commonly works with clients who have already successfully rehosted and replatformed applications. To a lesser extent, we see mainframe applications encapsulated in a modern RESTful API or replaced altogether. Businesses frequently take those first steps in their digital transformation but find themselves stuck crossing the gap to a fully modern application.

What are common issues and solutions businesses face as they move away from outdated technologies and progress towards fully modern applications?

Keeping the Goal in Mind

Overcoming the inertia to begin a modernization project is often a lengthy process, requiring several months or as much as a year or more to complete the first phases. Development teams require training, thorough and careful planning must occur, and unforeseen challenges are encountered and overcome. Through it all, the needs of the business never slow down, and the temptation to halt or dramatically slow legacy modernization efforts after the initial phases of modernization can be substantial.

No matter what the end state of the modernization journey looks like, it can be helpful to keep it at the forefront of the development team’s minds. In today’s remote and hybrid working environment, that’s not as easy as keeping a whiteboard or poster in a room. Sprint ceremonies should include a brief reminder of long-term business goals, especially for backlog or sprint reviews. Keep the team invested in the business and technical reasons and the question “why modernize legacy applications” at the forefront of their minds. Most importantly, solicit their feedback on the process required to accomplish the long-term strategic goals of the business.

With the goal firmly in your development team’s minds, it’s time to tackle tactics in migrating from legacy apps to newer systems. What are some of these common stumbling blocks on the road to refactoring and rearchitecting legacy software?

Refactoring

Refactoring an application can encompass a broad set of areas. Refactoring is sometimes as straightforward as reducing technical debt, or it can be as complex as breaking apart a monolithic application into smaller services. In 2nd Watch’s experience, some common issues when refactoring running applications include:

Limited knowledge of cloud-based architectural patterns.
Even common architectures like 2- and 3-tier applications require some legacy code changes when an application has moved from a data center to a cloud service provider or among cloud service providers. Where an older application may have hardcoded IP addresses or DNS, a modern approach to accessing application tiers would use environment variables configured at runtime, pointing at load balancers.
Lack of telemetry and observability.
Development teams are frequently hesitant to make changes quickly because there are too many unknowns in their application. Proper monitoring of known unknowns (metrics) and unknown unknowns (observability) can demystify the impact of refactoring. For more context around the types of unknowns and how to work with them in an application, Charity Majors frequently writes on the topic.
Lack of thorough automated tests.
A lack of automated tests also slows the ability to make changes because developers cannot anticipate what their changes might break. Improved telemetry and observability can help, but automated testing is the other side of the equation. Tools like Codecov can initially help improve test coverage, but unless carefully attended, incentivizing a percentage of test coverage across the codebase can lead to tests that do not thoroughly cover all common use cases. Good unit tests and integration testing can halt problems before they even start.
No blueprint for optimal refactoring.
Without a clear blueprint for understanding what an optimally refactored app looks like, development and information technology teams can become frustrated or unclear about their end goals. Heroku’s Twelve-Factor App methodology is one commonly used framework for crafting or refactoring modern applications. It has the added benefit of being applicable to many deployment models – single- or multiple-server, containers, or serverless.

Rearchitecting

Rearchitecting an application to leverage better capabilities, such as those found in a cloud service provider’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options, may present some challenges. The most common challenge 2nd Watch encounters with clients is not fully understanding the options available in modern environments. Older applications are the product of their time and typically were built optimally for the available technology and needs. However, when rearchitecting those applications, sometimes development teams either don’t know or don’t have details about better options that may be available.

Running a MySQL database on the same machine as the rest of the monolithic application may have made sense when initially writing the application. Today, many applications can run more cheaply, more securely, and with the same or better performance using a combination of cloud storage buckets, managed caches like Redis or Memcached, and secrets managers. These consumption-based cloud options tend to be significantly cheaper than managed databases or databases running on cloud virtual machines. Scaling automatically with end-user demand and reduced management overhead are additional benefits of software modernization.

Rearchitecting an application can also be frustrating for experienced systems administrators tasked with maintaining and troubleshooting production applications. For example, moving from VMs to containers introduces an entirely different way of dealing with logs. Sysadmins must forward them to a log aggregator instead of storing them on disk. Autoscaling a service can mean the difference between identifying which instances – of potentially dozens or hundreds – had an issue instead of a small handful of them. Application modernization impacts every person involved with the long-term success of that application, not just developers and end-users.

Conclusion

Application Modernization is a long-term strategic activity, not a short-term tactical activity. Over time, you will realize the benefits of the lower total cost of ownership (TCO), increased agility, and faster time to market. Recognizing and committing to the future of your business will help you overcome the short- and mid-term challenges of app modernization.

Engaging a trusted partner to accelerate your app modernization journey and lead the charge across that gap is a powerful strategy to overcome some of the highlighted problems. It can be difficult to overcome a challenge with the same mindset that led to creating that challenge. An influx of different ideas and experiences can be the push development teams need to reach the next level for a business.

If you’re wondering how to modernize legacy applications and are ready to work with a trusted advisor that can help you cross that gap, 2nd Watch will meet you wherever you are in your journey. Contact us to schedule a discussion of your goals, challenges, and how we can help you reach the end game of modern business applications.

Michael Gray, 2nd Watch Senior Cloud Consultant