Case Study: Big Data Corp’s Website Migration to Azure

Customer About

A mid-size big data corporation founded in 2014 with 80+ big data pioneers, headquartered in San Francisco, California has developed a data infrastructure solution that allows customers to deploy, scale, manage and explore your data across hybrid infrastructures in one centralized interface.

This corporation also have operation teams in London, Switzerland, Taiwan, Australia, and UAE. The data pioneer utilized its expertise to generate simple storytelling visualization analytics solutions out of complex data associations and relationships.

Challenge

This corporation has won a government bid for the creation of a public-facing promotion website. The requirements of this website include public access availability incorporating a Content Management System. Therefore, they have already built an on-premises WordPress CMS website prototype built upon Ubuntu Linux. Features of their prototype includes ImageMagick, a transcoding/resizing program that resizes photos and PDFs before passing onto My SQL database.

Their next goal was to migrate to Azure to satisfy the needs of public access, high data traffic, storage, scalability, and several additional demands. The main additional demand is customized adaptation and storage of various files (images and PDFs) in preparation of their future App Service conversion project. Since they wish to preserve their use of certain Linux WordPress plugins, they have made the decision to conduct Linux OS migration to Azure with the help of Caloudi.

Choice of Cloud Migration- Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is a smart, cost-effective public cloud that assists organizations to remain competitive and profitable. By adopting Microsoft Azure, organizations can optimize cost, speed up the delivery of solutions, and focus on higher impact work.

According to Microsoft research, they had proudly stated that 50% of new VMs running in Azure were running Linux and Linux-based image cores comprise 60% of Azure Marketplace Images. In addition, organizations can enjoy scalable storage, stronger data security, task automation, and plenty of cloud services while utilizing Microsoft Azure to meet each company’s cloud usage demands.

Solution

To achieve a secure, on-demand, public-facing, CMS-based promotion website, we have planned a migration solution catered to migrate their CMS-based website to Azure.

We have segmented our solution into three parts: computation, network, and security. For computation, On-premises Linux Server is migrated to Azure and becomes Ubuntu Server. Applications such as Apache, WordPress, PHP, ImageMagick has been installed to the Ubuntu VM. Whereas images and documents are stored in both disk and storage account. Other custom settings include Azure Backup for auto-backups and VM Scale Set for Salability and High Availability settings. Next, network solution includes isolated database using Azure Database for MySQL with Azure Firewall for IP protection. Lastly, we have deployed Azure Bastion Service with the setting of Network Security Group to secure remote access.