Application Migration to AWS
A Story of Owning Change
About NAVIS
NAVIS is the number one Reservation Sales and Marketing platform for the hospitality industry. NAVIS’ game-changing Revenue Performance Platform™ transforms teams into revenue makers, enabling them to drive, capture and convert more direct bookings. Founded in 1987, NAVIS is a privately held company with headquarters in Bend, Oregon, and growing offices in Orlando, Florida, and Reno, Nevada.
It wasn’t until we attended 1Strategy’s AWS boot camp that we learned that you can actually be cost-effective while leveraging various AWS services beyond just Amazon S3. 1Strategy provided us valuable AWS knowledge, allowing us to gain a better insight and education of key benefits that we should be taking advantage of.
—Damion D’Oyley, Senior Manager of Information Technology at NAVIS
The Challenge
Prior to 2018, NAVIS had a small footprint within Amazon Web Services (AWS), taking advantage of Amazon S3 and AWS Lambda for their production SaaS environments. Simultaneously, NAVIS’ business components had mainly consisted of on-premises data centers and virtual servers. However, satisfied with the value they received from AWS, NAVIS decided to increase their presence on AWS by migrating a larger on-premises database and application to AWS. Though NAVIS recognized the value of AWS, they needed additional AWS guidance and expertise in areas like big data, DevOps, application transformation and security.
“We wanted to move more of our data and applications to the AWS cloud, and the challenge was finding the appropriate AWS solutions and services that were best suited for each of them as we continue to adapt and increase the business value for our customers,” said Dave Owens, software development manager at NAVIS.
Why Amazon Web Services
In 2016, NAVIS was outgrowing their on-premises, expensive storage area network (SAN) and was faced with either building another SAN or moving storage to the cloud. After an initial, successful migration of 25 terabytes of raw file data to AWS, the company was evaluating whether to take their AWS journey further and decided to attend a 1Strategy boot camp in Portland, Oregon. It was there that they gained foundational AWS understanding and decided to migrate workloads to AWS.
“It wasn’t until we attended 1Strategy’s AWS boot camp that we learned that you can actually be cost-effective while leveraging various AWS services beyond just Amazon S3,” said Damion D’Oyley, senior manager of information technology at NAVIS. “1Strategy provided us valuable AWS knowledge, allowing us to gain a better insight and education of key benefits that we should be taking advantage of.”
In describing 1Strategy’s AWS boot camps, D’Oyley added, “I really appreciated 1Strategy’s philosophy in how they teach their boot camps. To me, this was a true-blue boot camp, where they offered little in the way of marketing and sales speak, but instead, they provided the technical and helpful AWS information we needed, which allowed us to return and apply this beneficial knowledge to our architecture. As a result of this boot camp, we decided to expand our AWS evolution and partnered with 1Strategy.”
The Benefits
To accelerate their AWS migration, NAVIS participated in the AWS Proof of Concept (POC) Program and engaged with 1Strategy to aid in their first substantial application migration to AWS. During this engagement, 1Strategy supported NAVIS in containerizing this application and migrating it to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). This would permit the company to easily deploy and scale their application—scaling on demand was a key factor for NAVIS in advancing their journey on AWS.
“Our goal was to break up our monolithic applications into smaller pieces, and AWS gives us the tools to make this happen and provides us the ability to scale on demand,” said Owens.
In addition to helping NAVIS get their containerized application up and running on AWS, 1Strategy also provided reference architectures for the next application to be migrated to AWS. NAVIS was weighing the business impacts of different service-level agreements (SLAs) for a critical application. To aid in NAVIS’ decision-making, 1Strategy provided two architectural options for running this application on AWS—one with 99.99% availability and one with 99.999% availability.
As NAVIS was expanding internationally and serving customers in different countries, various roadblocks were presented that were related to specific laws and governance about the use of data storage.
“As I started to look at the global footprint of AWS, it started to make sense for NAVIS to use AWS due to our forecasted international traffic and customer growth,” said D’Oyley. “AWS is able to deliver services for collecting and processing large data streams in real time with the ability to host their data in their local or geographic area. This allows us to satisfy our clients’ demands and needs now and in the future.”
In describing the qualifications and efforts of 1Strategy, D’Oyley stated, “1Strategy’s DevOps engineer Stephanie Lingwood and the 1Strategy team [are] on point with the execution of our initial migration from on-prem to AWS and represent as seasoned pros, delivering AWS excellence and outstanding work.”
D’Oyley added that their AWS evolution is now proceeding in a positive and advantageous way as they manage their production and applications on AWS.
The work described in this engagement was originally completed by 1Strategy, a TEKsystems Global Services company acquired in 2019. As of June 2023, 1Strategy has fully integrated with TEKsystems Global Services to continue to deliver AWS expertise to customers. Learn more about our AWS solutions.
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