Rescon Builders: Reducing cloud billing migrating from Azure to AWS

About Rescon Builders

RESCON Builders, an established Australian company that designs, builds, and redefines granny flats across NSW, worked with DNX to migrate their Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform to AWS to save an average of 50% in costs, gaining the ability to deliver more features to their applications and speed up the development process.

The Business Challenge

Rescon had their application platform on Microsoft Azure on a highly tailored environment using Windows Servers and MS SQL Server Databases. Rescon’s technical debt was just growing as they were using a non-Cloud-Native stack, being unable to leverage cloud advantages, like high availability, scalability, automation and zero-downtime deploys.

They were facing a raising bill on Azure while they were unable to capture the agility of modern development to deploy new features. The company needed to leverage performance x costs to achieve competitive advantage.

The Solution

DNX proposed a AWS Well-Architected platform leveraging years of DevOps practices using the benefits of high availability, scalability, automation in the cloud.

In oder to achieve this scenario DNX architected a multi account and network segregation platform in AWS, using GitLab CI/CD pipelines with custom runners in AWS as the solution to build a zero-downtime deployments solution.

The Project

To comply with Rescon’s objectives, DNX delivered an infrastructure as code AWS Well-Architected platform based on multiple accounts and network segregation, introduced DevSecOps practices for the development teams through a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery Pipeline and migrated Rescon’s applications to Containers, providing a solid, secure, and cost-efficient platform.

DNX deployed to Rescon:

• Fully automated AWS platform using infrastructure as code through Terraform

• Docker Container platform, based on AWS Elastic Container Service highly available and scalable, allowing Rescon to use Blue-Green deployment strategy, using Spot Instances to save computing costs

• CI/CD Pipelines for zero-downtime deployment

• MS SQL Server migration to a managed SQL Server RDS Database

• A new set of AWS features enabling Rescon’s new projects (Lambda for Serverless applications, DynamoDB, Elastic Search, Cognito and AWS API Gateway)

AWS Services

List of AWS services that helped the customer to reduce cost and get their business value stream aligned with the business strategy:

• Cloudfront

• WAF

• Route53

• ALB

• VPC

• ECS

• RDS

Cost Reduction

DNX compared AWS costs for the last three months with Azure utilisation, showing an average saving of 51.4%.

Conclusion

Migrating their workloads from Azure to AWS Rescon obtained a reliable, robust, secure and cost-effective cloud platform, allowing them to experiment on a breadth of new services for building a more competitive platform for their customers for half of the cost of their former platform.