Organizations are constantly challenged with managing and harnessing vast amounts of data to drive informed business decisions. As data modernization becomes a top priority, organizations are increasingly investing in transferring data from legacy environments to cloud-based environments. In fact, data modernization emerged as the top focus of data and analytics investment in 2022.
Alation, a leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, recognized the need to modernize its application and ensure the uptime and reliability of its production environment on AWS. Based in California, Alation provides a single place for data users, regardless of technical skill set, to find, understand, and trust the data they need to make business decisions.
To address these challenges, Alation partnered with nClouds, an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, to transform its infrastructure and optimize its operations. This blog explores how nClouds helped Alation achieve its goals and reap the benefits of a modernized application environment on AWS.
Challenge
Alation’s primary challenge was to modernize its application while maintaining high uptime and reliability on AWS.
The company sought to migrate its application from Amazon EC2 to Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) and create a hybrid on-premises/cloud platform for different tenants. However, Alation’s engineering team was stretched thin, dividing their efforts between ensuring environment stability and developing innovative features for their application.
Alation’s long-standing partnership with nClouds and AWS played a pivotal role in overcoming these challenges.
Solution
The collaboration began with migrating Alation from on-premises to AWS, followed by the modernization of its monolithic infrastructure to a containerized environment. To sustain its production environment and support its growing business, Alation engaged nClouds to manage site reliability and provide 24/7 support services for end customers in a multitenant AWS environment.
nClouds implemented a modernized Amazon EKS-based architecture for Alation on AWS, leveraging various AWS services and automation tools. This architecture with Amazon EKS included the following:
- Automation
- Availability and performance
- Efficiency
- Scalability
- Security
- Support and reliability
Benefits
The partnership between Alation and nClouds has yielded significant benefits for the organization:
- Engineers can devote more time to product innovation: By offloading the responsibility of maintaining the production environment to nClouds, Alation’s engineers now have more time to focus on product innovation.
- Enhanced support of the application layer for end customers: nClouds’ engineers handle site reliability and provide 24/7 application-layer support for Alation’s end customers.
- Expert modernization of the application infrastructure: Alation entrusted nClouds’ Site Reliability Engineering team with applying their AWS and DevOps expertise to implement a modernized Amazon EKS-based architecture. This modern infrastructure enables Alation to innovate faster while reducing risk, accelerating time to market, and lowering the total cost of ownership.
Alation’s partnership with nClouds and AWS has proven instrumental in modernizing its application and ensuring the uptime and reliability of its production environment.
By leveraging AWS services and nClouds’ expertise, Alation now benefits from a modernized infrastructure that allows its engineers to focus on innovation, provides enhanced support to end customers, and delivers expert application modernization.
For more information, read the full case study.
