CMA CGM Migrates On-premises Servers to Improve Redundancy and Scalability
Challenge
CMA CGM needed to migrate on-premises servers to the cloud in a short time period for its North American division.
Solution
ClearScale helped the client re-host its servers and implement key cloud capabilities, including Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) utilizing Terraform, building CI/CD pipelines for future deployment, and more.
Benefits
CMA CGM’s North American division now has cloud-based servers that offer better scalability and performance to keep up with the global company’s operations.
AWS Services
AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, AWS Migration Hub, AWS Application Migration Service
Executive Summary
CMA CGM is a French company founded in 1978 that provides global shipping services to more than 160 countries. These services include freight delivery, container fleet management, and logistics, among other essential shipping-related activities. Today, CMA CGM has 593 vessels that serve 420 of the largest commercial ports in the world, as well as 750 warehouses and 155,000 employees.
Recently, the North American subsidiary of CMA CGM determined it needed to migrate all locally hosted servers to the cloud to align with the broader organizational IT strategy. To ensure a successful migration, the company hired ClearScale, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services Partner with the AWS Migration competency. ClearScale was the ideal candidate to handle a fast migration for the shipping giant.
The Challenge
CMA CGM North America was facing two primary challenges that required help from a cloud expert like ClearScale: a short migration timeline and a lack of server reliability. The North American subsidiary were charged with rehosting systems to AWS by the end of the year so that the organization could shut down certain on-premises serves within data centers.
The client also had to ensure its new cloud-based servers were more redundant and reliable overall. The North American division needed to elevate to a new standard quickly to keep up with IT modernization goals at the enterprise level. Fortunately, ClearScale had both the AWS cloud migration knowledge and experience to address each need.
The ClearScale Solution
CMA CGM and ClearScale partnered to outline a migration roadmap to rehost target servers to AWS. The client wanted ClearScale to complete the work within three months while retaining the current technology stack.
Before moving forward, ClearScale gathered the client’s business requirements and conducted audits of the organization’s servers and application deployments. From there, ClearScale created a migration plan that involved re-hosting the client’s servers to Amazon EC2 instances and leveraging Amazon RDS database services where applicable.
Additionally, ClearScale helped CMA CGM North America accomplish the following:
- Development of IaC automation code for infrastructure deployment
- Deployment of Dev and Production environments
- Validation of infrastructure and test applications
- Documentation of new architecture and operational runbook
For the actual migration, ClearScale also took care of data synchronization and the ultimate service cutover. Everything went according to plan under the proposed timeline.
The Benefits
Thanks to ClearScale’s cloud migration support, CMA CGM North America benefitted in several ways. First, the division gained high-availability servers that are more reliable and redundant, decreasing operational risk significantly. Second, the division was able to reduce licensing costs by removing VMWare and switching over to pay-as-you-go AWS pricing. Third, CMA CGM North America replaced rigid legacy infrastructure with an ecosystem that is much more scalable. The division’s cloud architecture and servers can flex up and down easily with the company’s needs.
The subsidiary is also now operating more in line with the broader enterprise IT strategy, which will set the region up for success going forward in our fast-paced, interconnected world.