Realistic cloud migrations for large companies
Many companies dream of realizing the cloud’s promise for their own systems — simplified administration, infrastructure agility, lower costs, and so forth.
Cloud dreams can become hazier in large organizations with thousands of different systems, mainframe applications, and regulatory demands. There can be significant challenges that prevent a move to the cloud:
Ab Initio software enables companies facing such challenges to go to the cloud, either partially in a hybrid configuration or fully. Our utilities can help automate a system’s conversion to high-performing Ab Initio applications. Once converted to Ab Initio’s technology, companies can rapidly move their applications to the cloud with containerized, 12F-compliant workloads. They can also stagger their cloud migration in a gradually phased manner, moving their VMs off premises, reducing storage expenses by migrating to object or blob storage, and then eventually migrating to containers.
Migrating decades of development from on premises to the cloud could involve years of work. Or it could be done with Ab Initio.
A major US credit card provider built one of the world’s most innovative Business Intelligence environments using Ab Initio software. After decades of on-premises software development and operations, they decided to take advantage of new technologies, eliminate local data centers, and move to the cloud.
Moving a system that had been developed over a span of 20 years is not an easy prospect. The data was stored in a very large, expensive data warehouse. There were over 100,000 lines of SQL, including vendor-specific SQL. There were thousands of Ab Initio graphs. They did not have detailed information on exactly which graphs were running, how often they ran, and which parameters they ran with. That information was buried in the job scheduling system and in the shell scripts that launched the jobs, and it needed to be unearthed before proceeding with the migration.
Because automation was the key to this migration effort, they worked with Ab Initio to build the automation machinery. In some cases, Ab Initio provided out-of-the-box automation tools and translators. In other cases, the two teams worked together to build custom automation tools. Automated translation of Ab Initio–based application logic is possible because of Ab Initio’s unique structure and metadata-driven processing model. Ab Initio’s analysis tools automatically documented the various job and data dependencies. Ab Initio–developed tools also analyzed hundreds of thousands of runtime log files.
This migration took 18 months, a remarkably short time for a project of this magnitude. Working with Ab Initio, the credit card provider ended up with a more resilient system capable of taking advantage of the latest technologies, and they saved millions of dollars.