Presentation from AWS user group meetup at Prague.

1. Journey to the cloud
Operating hybrid infrastructure

3. IT at Economia
• 70+ employees. Mostly Development and IT Ops
• 1000+ servers (on-premise) infrastructure in 3 DC
at Prague. Large and robust network infrastructure
• 4Gbps traffic and 4mio unique visitors each month
• Everything based on OpenSource - Debian Linux
as our main platform
• Programming in PHP, C, Pythonu and JS

4. Our “challenge”
“…and from Chinese competitors that can produce a
device "much faster than, as one Nokia employee said
only partially in jest, 'the time that it takes us to polish a
PowerPoint presentation.”
Nokia - CEO

5. Why we didn't move
completely?
• Network latency and cost for outgoing connectivity
• We are not global player and majority of our traffic is
from CZ (local). We are member of czech NIX with
plenty of throughput available for us for low price.
• Legacy infrastructure. We still want to milk our previous
investments
• Some of our services are not ready to move to cloud. Ie.
Email service requires specific setup and deployment.
• Lack of features on some AWS products (ELB)

6. Hybrid infastructure
Production
VLAN
Devevelopment VLAN
AWS productionInternet
IT Ops
AWS dev
Route53
DC production
DC Dev
AWS 3rd party
Jenkins Dev
instances
Developers
Ansible management
CLI
S3
VmW
IPsec Tunnels

7. Advantages of running
cloud infrastructure*
• Simple cost allocation mechanism with immediate
impact of optimisation changes into product’s P&L.
• Separated/Isolated accounts for different suppliers
- something which is hard to image in our on-
premise infrastructure.
• We are now thinking more about Disaster Recovery
procedures etc… even in our on-premise inf.
*on top of the usual ones

8. AWS enabled service
Internet
FE
instances
S3
Nginx
LB
DB
instances
BE
instances
Lambda
Internal systems
Repo, Auth, Monitoring

9. Next Steps
• Docker as a replacement for our current packaging
system (dev)
• Shutdown of our legacy storage system (NetApp) and
switch to Amazon Elastic File System, when available.
• Spot instances - mainly for QA a nightly tasks
• Slow evolution of services - switching to micro
service architecture - leverage all possibilities AWS
can offer for horizontal scaling.

10. … bon voyage
Štěpán Burda
CTO
Economia a.s.
@astinusp
https://about.me/astinus