Cloud Solution & Migrations

The Situation
The customer required their on-prem hosted enterprise application to be redesigned, rebuilt and migrated to public Cloud. The application was a monolith style application built using Microsoft tech stack. The application was  receiving and processing data from third-parties via files sent over ftp service. The applications backend database was creaking under the ever increasing needs for processing and over the years huge amount of tech debt had been accumulated. The application had its custom user identity management system which was very clunky and did not adhere to standards. The application was failing under its own weight and the customer was keen to rebuild and launch the new application in 9 months.

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The Opportunity
The design and implementation of this system offered a variety of challenges. For example, the application needed to be robust enough to handle the storage and processing of large amounts of data. With over 1.5 TB of data involved, security was also incredibly important, as well as backups for the information itself. There were particular challenges around the application authentication and authorization. The application identity had to be redesigned from scratch to align with the company's public cloud platform and processes. The interaction with third-parties needed to be upgraded to modern API standards as well as secured. The application code itself had to be remodelled to be more modular along with a conflicting need to reuse as much as possible of the existing code. There was a real opportunity here to build a more sustainable and future proof system.

 

The Outcome
Working  with the company's enterprise and solution architecture community we proposed a redesign of the critical application along with an incremental roadmap to delivery. The targeted platform chosen to host the redesigned application was MS Azure cloud. The applications database had to be robust, scalable and readily available with millisecond grade response times. We chose MS Azure Cosmos DB (No-Sql solution) as a backend database. The application users identity was managed via Azure Active Directory and role based access was managed via Azure groups essentially enabling the company's platform and Ops teams to manage the application access in a more streamlined manner. The applications user addition and removal was also linked with company's joiners/leavers process via automated api integration. 

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The application front end was build using SPA (Single Page Application) pattern using Angular.js and integration with the identity system was managed via MSAL.js. The application was built to be a Progressive web application (PWA) and was designed to adapt to consumer device( web desktop or mobile). We reused the existing core logic where possibly by moving some of the backend core logic to Azure function apps and consumed via backend API. 

 

The integration with third-parties was moved to API based integration rather then the unreliable file based (ftp) transfer. The API was secured via OAuth2.0 security protocol and guidance was provided to third-parties to consume the company's API effectively. The whole enterprise application was built and deployed onto the company's cloud platform using principles such as Infrastructure As a Code (IAAC), PAAS first then IAAS as well as continuous Integration and Deployment ( CICD). The application security was built to last and was based on zero trust security model.

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Finally the application was delivered in-time and on-budget and was  a resounding success with the various stakeholders.