NYCM Insurance
CLOUD MIGRATION
PGA of America
ENTERPRISE-SCALE MIGRATION AND AUTOMATION
Executive Summary
The PGA of America (PGA) worked with EagleDream Technologies, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partner, to migrate Windows workloads to AWS. As a result, PGA can modernize its applications, scale to support seasonal workloads, and ensure high availability for customer-facing applications.
About PGA of America
The Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) of America, founded in 1916, is one of the world’s largest sports organizations. The organization comprises nearly 29,000 professionals who are considered experts in teaching and growing interest in the game of golf. The PGA of America’s mission is to establish and elevate the standards of the profession and grow interest and participation in the game of golf.
Catered to the Experience.
“The PGA of America is undergoing a transformation to the AWS hyper-scale cloud. Going into this journey, we were faced with many of the same critical business challenges other organizations have had to overcome: how to build the most secure, high performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure possible for our applications. Finding the right partner to help guide us through this journey was critical to the ultimate success of our AWS transformation.”
KEVIN J. SCOTT
Head of Technology
PGA of America Seeks Application Modernization
The PGA of America was previously running traditional workloads using Windows processes and Microsoft SQL Servers based upon ColdFusion and custom application developments as well as a Windows-based system that automatically kept score during live tournaments, in on-premises data centers. However, the organization wanted to modernize their IT environment and increase scalability and reliability for their applications. In addition, the PGA member-facing website, an Oracle-based application, often went down and members had trouble registering for events on time.
To address these problems, PGA sought to move to the cloud that would, in return, reduce costs, minimize tribal knowledge, and leverage automation capabilities to improve flexibility and agility within their environment.
Eagledream's Solution
A Dual Solution Approach
Phase 1
Migration
Phase 2
Automation
How EagleDream Delivered
Phase #1: Migrating Windows Workloads to AWS
With the support of EagleDream, PGA decided to move its Windows and Oracle-based applications to AWS. EagleDream initiated the migration by establishing overall AWS Account Structures and designed highly efficient and modern private cloud environments to hold the PGA’s workloads. EagleDream moved several of PGA’s workloads to Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows Server. Once the scoring system migration was completed, EagleDream created a proof of concept using Amazon ECS and Docker containers to help PGA move from Windows to Linux. PGA chose to use Amazon ECS and Docker containers because of cost efficiency, enhanced developer productivity, and automated deployment capabilities.
Phase #2: Automation to Improve Availability & Resiliency
EagleDream implemented AWS CodeDeploy for automation as well as AWS CloudFormation templates that the PGA IT team uses to simplify deployment and conduct testing before moving to production. PGA also uses AWS Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB to enable a serverless architecture. Most recently, EagleDream helped PGA move its Oracle database to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle to enable performance improvements.
Powerful Results
EagleDream’s dual solution approach strategically aligned with the PGA’s key objectives and achieved the following results:
GREATER VISIBILITY
The team can now see how and what their systems are running at any given time and identify when things start to change in any application or database. Before, PGA had to manually look at individual log files. Now, with the automation enabled by AWS, the organization has enhanced monitoring tools to see things like CPU and memory utilization much more easily and can now discover problems and system bottlenecks faster as a result.
OPERATIONAL RESILIENCE
When PGA started their AWS journey, they had weekly application outages. Since migrating to AWS, the organization has seen next to no unplanned outages. The migration greatly improved their back-up and recovery capabilities contributing to their efforts to better secure future workloads and mitigate potential risks. PGA members have noted improved website speeds as a result of the migration.
IMPROVED SCALABILITY
The automated docker and container solutions have helped PGA make the most of their new flexible and agile development environment. Built-for-scale, the solutions will support the PGA in quickly reacting to future changes in their environment such as increased traffic volume during seasonal tournaments such as the Women’s PGA Championship.
Building a Secure Foundation with an AWS Well-Architected Review
Learn how PGA worked with EagleDream to further optimize the security, cost-effectiveness, reliability, and performance of their AWS infrastructure using the AWS Well-Architected Review.
The Unique Role of EagleDream and AWS
EagleDream’s extensive knowledge in AWS infrastructure and experience in cloud migration and DevOps processes were evident in their approach. The team’s efforts were closely aligned with the PGA’s goals, and a collaborative and customer-focused relationship was key in the success of the project. The following were some of the key responsibilities of the EagleDream team:
- Built a proof–of-concept on how to best leverage AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and a lift-and-shift migration of the PGA’s on-premises site
- Built a proof–of-concept leveraging Amazon ECS and Docker Containers that would allow for the PGA to move from Windows to Linux
- Implemented AWS CodeDeploy automation for on-premises and cloud ColdFusion projects
- Collaborated with the AWS team to provide a one-day working session on operating containerized applications on AWS
- Built AWS CloudFormation templates for use by the PGA team
ALL THE TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES USED
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon API Gateway
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon ECS
- Elastic Load Balancing
- AWS CloudFormation
- Amazon CloudFront
- Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
- Amazon CloudWatch
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
- Amazon S3
Core Partners and Applications
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