The Challenge
Softcat are working with a range of customers who require cloud assessment services to help accelerate their journey to AWS.
These customers have established IT portfolios housed in datacentres and wish to understand how to migrate to cloud in the best manner, utilising lift-and-shift or re-architecting onto AWS native services where appropriate.
The Solution
Softcat architected and deployed the AppScore platform into AWS using a combination of core services.
This AppScore service allows Softcat to accelerate a customer’s adoption of AWS public cloud services by accurately assessing the customer’s applications using an application-centric approach, thus being able to profile application suitability more effectively and deliver faster migration services.
The platform brings a consultative and business focus to application migration and provides a standardised end-to-end process ensuring that Softcat can provide a robust and repeatable response to customers’ cloud migration requirements.
The AppScore platform is deployed via a set of Docker containers using ECS and Fargate. Route53 and ALBs are used to direct traffic to the site. Data is stored in MongoDB delivered via MongoDB’s Atlas service, which is hosted in the most appropriate region on AWS. The AppScore platform ingests server data from multiple sources including AWS’s Migration Evaluator, Device42 and other discovery or asset management tools.
Why Softcat?
Customers with established IT estates are keen to adopt cloud but have voiced concerns about solely using a lift-and-shift approach with basic discovery and assessment tools, which they realise will only deliver marginal gains.
It is clear that they are looking for a more wide ranging assessment and recommendation that considers business context and provides them with a plan to becoming cloud-native.
Softcat takes a holistic approach, looking at the business objectives of the organisation to create a solution that is the best fit.
Using AppScore enables Softcat to recommend the use of AWS services that go beyond IaaS such as the replacement of SQL Server with RDS or the refactoring of applications to be cloud native using Lambda, SQS, S3 etc.
Multiple customer migration assessments have now been completed, resulting in at least one datacentre exit and migration of all services to AWS.
