Edipresse moved 250 servers
to the cloud

EDIPRESSE CASE STUDY

Edipresse Polska is an international media company which intensely develops its portfolio of websites (such as: polki.pl, wizaz.pl, party.pl, niania.pl, mamotoja.pl and viva.pl) and publishes magazines (e.g. VIVA!, Party. Życie Gwiazd!, Uroda Życia, Mamotoja).

The high popularity of the websites (up to 100 million views per month) as well as their number and diversity present challenges to the IT infrastructure. The challenge Edipresse had to face was to prepare the infrastructure for the enormous website traffic and to ensure its stability, scalability, and security.

Before the complete migration of the websites to the Oktawave cloud, the infrastructure of Edipresse was running mainly on the company’s physical servers with auxiliary services scattered across multiple cloud providers. That sort of decentralized architecture was hard to manage efficiently, both in terms of technology and costs.

Aware of those problems, Edipresse wished to focus its energy on website development, not on a constant struggle for the maintenance of IT infrastructure stability. Cost-effectiveness and the desire to get rid of the technical debt were also important. The company needed a combination of high-quality infrastructure solutions with migration and maintenance services that would yield the best TCO possible in three years.

CHALLENGE

The biggest business challenge turned out to be the migration itself, and in particular, the time constraints. Edipresse had less than 3 months to migrate 250 servers running a tech stack that hadn't been updated for years. A comprehensive migration like that required a team of specialists who understand the challenges, suggest a new architecture, and carry out the migration safely.

Looking for a cloud provider, Edipresse spoke to numerous teams of engineers. They wanted to engage specialists who would work with them side-by-side on the migration project. Eventually, it was the Cloud Operations & Cloud Migrations specialists at Oktawave that proposed the best migration strategy. They creatively tackled the infrastructure design while taking care of the financial aspect. Consequently, they proposed a holistic approach that turned out to be the best fit in terms of technology, operations, and finance.

SOLUTION

What problems we faced and how we solved them:

• Risk management - the most difficult and time-consuming problems were solved first.
• Time management - in this situation the Pareto principle worked - the transfer of 80% of the functionality took 20% of the time, the migration of legacy systems – 80%.
• Technical debt - a very outdated tech stack with minimal documentation.
• Architecture management - creating a uniform architecture for all websites that can be easily adapted to the needs of a specific portal, without incurring unnecessary costs. Architecture is shared, but adaptable to traffic volumes and business needs. Additionally, the number of servers has been reduced (from 250 to 104), while improving the availability and performance of the infrastructure.
• High availability management - HA requires a lot of attention and fine-tuning, but if done correctly, it ensures applications' availability in the event of downtime, migrations, and maintenance.

The migration process was completed. Certainly, a well-defined goal contributed to it - Edipresse presented clearly defined requirements and the Oktawave team tailored the service. High motivation of teams, professionalism and knowledge of technologies (both cloud-based and those from the distant past), and most of all effective communication between Oktawave and Edipresse proved to be a guarantee of the project's success.

The biggest benefits of Edipresse from migrating to the Oktawave cloud include:

1. Decrease in infrastructure maintenance costs by 30%
2. Safer cash-flow, no CAPEX
3. Getting rid of the technical debt
4. Increasing technological security
5. Opportunity to focus on business development - infrastructure develops thanks to Oktawave
6. Better infrastructure performance, reducing the number of servers from 250 to 104
7. No long-term failures and 99.998% availability

I envisioned an architecture that would allow us to build any website in any way we want, operating within the same infrastructure framework. And it was one of the more difficult tasks but we managed to do it.

Dymitr Mażar, CTO of Edipresse Polska