Building applications twice as fast with Bell and AWS

June 10, 2024

Cecilia Liu

When it comes to customer service, providing a self-serve application is critical to reducing wait times, enhancing the user experience and staying competitive. This makes finding or building applications a priority – and any opportunity to reduce that time and cost is very attractive.

One Canadian technology services company saw the need to deliver customized experiences for its users in real-time. This meant it was time to transition to a more agile and scalable cloud environment. With Bell and AWS, the team can now quickly create and test new features to enhance the user experience while unlocking substantial cost savings.

Challenge | Overcoming on-premises bottlenecks

The organization realized that as the development team grew, so too did the demands they put on their current on-premises solution. As they outgrew the platform, developing and testing new app features or fixing bugs became challenging. Without proactive monitoring, the team could not detect server outages, leading to workload redistribution among the remaining servers, which created bottlenecks and reduced operating capacity.

To run the application workloads, the team used on-premises Mac Pro servers that were nearing the end of their warranty. Needing more capacity and scalability to meet increased workloads, the team decided to invest in a more modern technology stack, powered by a hybrid cloud solution.

To make the move, they needed a cloud solution capable of running Mac workloads and an expert partner to guide them through the migration process.

"The fixed capacity of our existing on-premises infrastructure reduced our options for exploring innovation, evolving the code base or adopting new technology stacks."

Self-serve development team member

Solution | Expert advice for a seamless cloud migration

Bell's cloud experts first conducted a migration assessment. This evaluated the feasibility of migrating infrastructure to the cloud based on project requirements, solution architecture, and implementation costs. To validate the operations in the cloud, the assessment also provided a step-by-step migration path and a proof-of-concept project plan.

During a one-day cloud maturity assessment workshop, the Bell Cloud team evaluated the overall cloud strategy and provided an objective framework with guidelines to optimize the new solution architecture. The technical workshop also featured a thorough review by the team to align the proposed architecture with the company's internal networking, corporate security and data governance policies.

With planning and design complete, Bell's next proof-of-concept task was to help clarify SLAs during the AWS onboarding process and to solve configuration challenges like firewall port adjustments and network routing for new AWS regions. As the onboarding process was fine-tuned, subsequent firewall requests were faster, and the process became more apparent to the development team.

After the proof-of-concept was complete, Bell Cloud experts had a clear path to create the AWS instances, establish the development pipeline and execute builds. At the same time, the team integrated the solution with the company's existing DevOps and Quality (DOQ) stack, which ensured a smooth migration to the AWS cloud without disrupting development activities.

Bell and AWS solutions used in this project:

Bell Cloud Professional Services: