Project Description
About SMS Masterminds
SMS Masterminds builds and delivers a mobile loyalty marketing platform used by local businesses to find new customers while creating advocates from existing customers. The platform serves boutique retailers, restaurants, salons, and spas.
The Background
SMS Masterminds first engaged WSM more than three years ago to move from one cloud computing provider to another. Improving reliability and the ability to handle increased loads as the company grew were key objectives in the move. The computing workload ran Linux servers for the basic operations of the company, including a CRM system, billing, website management, and send/receive text messaging systems. The workload was highly database and memory intensive. WSM completed the migration in less than four weeks.
The Challenge
More than three years later, SMS Masterminds engaged WSM for another migration, this time to AWS. The company requested a “lift and shift” image-based migration to clone their existing production workload from the first project, along with current data in order to use it for development, QA, and load testing without interruption to business operations. The company requested we leverage image-based migration software, specifically tailored for use on AWS.
The Solution
Due to errors caused by limitations with the two lift-and-shift image-based migration software solutions SMS Masterminds selected, WSM had to fall-back to a manual migration of the environment. WSM was able to identify the software limitations, seek a refund for licensing fees due to those limitations and fall back to a manual migration process to successfully complete the project.
The Results
- Successfully fell back to manual migration and completed the move to AWS
- No impact on production workloads
- No impact on budget or timeline
The Feedback
“The team worked as quickly as possible while being extremely careful about not disrupting our business operations. From my experience, it is a complete fantasy that automation software alone can handle moving server software stacks and configurations flawlessly without issues.” – Luke Wallace, VP, Operaions
