Data Pipeline Migration from On-Premise to GCP


Client Overview

DailyHunt is Verse's flagship News App with over 300 Million Daily Active Users (DAU) and its complete infrastructure was running on-premised over a multi hypervisor environment composed of baremetal, VMWare & Nutanix. The data pipeline consisted of Hadoop, Kafka, Storm, HBase, KStream & Redis that struggled to scale with growing data volumes. Seeking enhanced scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency, the client approached Quark Media with the problem statement.

Challenge

The on-premises data pipeline faced several challenges

01.
Unreliability

Frequent downtimes of the data pipeline, which was impacting business.

02.
Bottleneck

Limited scalability, hindering the processing of increasing data loads.

03.
Expense

High maintenance costs associated with hardware upgrades and maintenance.

04.
Rigidity

Lack of flexibility in adapting to evolving technology and business needs.

Objectives

The client aimed to achieve the following objectives with the migration

01.
Migration

Seamless transition from on-premises to cloud infrastructure.

02.
Scalability

Improved scalability to handle growing data volumes.

03.
Reliability

Better uptimes & stability of the data pipeline platform.

04.
Adaptability

Enhanced flexibility and agility to adapt to changing business requirements.

Solution

Cloud Selection

After careful evaluation on performance, efficiency, scale and cost, we recommended the migration to Google cloud platform (GCP) for its robust infrastructure, comprehensive set of cloud services, reliable data store, BigData and competitive cost.

Capacity Planning

We recommended tools like StratoZone to do current infrastructure assessment, which can automatically discover existing infrastructure from any environment, analyze the cost-benefits of public cloud, and plan the migration.

Data Migration Strategy

Utilizing GCP migration tools like DMS, Storage Transfer Service (STS), RIOT for the Redis data migration, MirrorMaker for Kafka data replication we devised a phased approach for migrating databases and data repositories to the cloud, ensuring minimal downtime.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Leveraging infrastructure as code principles, we used tools like Terraform/Ansible to define and provision cloud infrastructure, enabling efficient replication of on-premises setups in the cloud.

Containerization

We containerized existing applications using Docker and orchestrated them with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), ensuring consistency across on-premises and cloud environments.

CI/CD Integration

Introduced continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices to automate testing and deployment processes, ensuring reliability and speed.

Implementation

01.
Assessment and Planning

A comprehensive analysis of existing infrastructure, data dependencies, and application requirements was conducted to formulate a detailed migration plan.

02.
Data Migration

Using GCP DMS, data was migrated with minimal downtime, and data integrity was rigorously maintained throughout the process.

03.
Application Refactoring

Applications were optimized for cloud architecture, taking advantage of cloud-native services and ensuring efficient resource utilization.

04.
Testing and Validation

Rigorous testing, including performance testing and data validation, was conducted at each migration phase to identify and rectify issues promptly.

Results

The migration delivered significant positive outcomes

01.
Scalability

The cloud-based data pipeline effortlessly scales to handle increased data loads, ensuring business continuity. Happy analyst as data can be queried and visualized anytime is alway available.

02.
Flexibility

The client now enjoys increased flexibility, easily adapting the data pipeline to evolving business needs.

03.
Optimized Infra

More traffic can be served with the reduced infra and better performance.

04.
Cost Efficiency

The migration led to optimized resource utilization, resulting in substantial cost savings compared to the on-premises infrastructure.