As cloud computing continues to gain popularity, companies that are natively Windows question if they too can leverage AWS. Learn about the benefits the cloud provides, best practices of cloud computing services, and solutions available on AWS for Windows workloads. Learn how Covanta is delivering services to its users 90% faster and saving more than 60% in IT infrastructure costs after migrating its Windows workloads to the cloud.

1. Proven Strategies for Windows on AWS
Migrating Your Windows Datacenter to AWS
Sabine Blair
2nd Watch
Karish Chowdhury
Covanta
2nd Watch and Covanta

2. Karish Chowdhury
Cloud Architect, Manager
Sabine Blair
Cloud Consultant
Introductions:

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4. Proven Strategies for Windows on AWS
Migrating Your Windows Datacenter to AWS
Karish Chowdhury

5. Who is Covanta?
Waste Management and Renewable Energy Industry
Covanta is a global provider of sustainable waste and energy solutions with
44 facilities worldwide. Covanta’s Energy-from-Waste facilities safely cover
20 millions tons of waste into clean, renewable electricity to power over on
million homes and recycle approximately 600,000 tons of metal.

6. Business Challenge
Covanta has grown aggressively through acquisition since 2010, resulting in
strains on its IT department and hampering the organization’s ability to quickly
integrate employees from acquired companies. Procuring, configuring and
deploying new applications took weeks or even months.
In 2015, Covanta chose to work with AWS in order to reduce its overhead, and
selected 2nd Watch to lead the AWS migration.

7. The Business Benefits and Outcomes
Realized Outcomes:
• On track for $1M in savings over three years
• Improve staff utilization
• Faster, more consistent deployments and scalability
Covanta is delivering services to users 90% faster and expects to save more
than 60% in IT infrastructure costs once fully deployed on AWS.

8. Conclusion
Covanta selected AWS for the platform’s depth and maturity. AWS allowed us to cut the
amount of time to perform deployments from weeks to hours while realizing
considerable cost savings.
“We are now much more efficient, and the time that we used to spend managing the
internal data center is now being spent supporting our business mission of
sustainability…2nd Watch has been a wonderful partner in helping us plan appropriately
for the migration and maintain productivity while on our journey to the cloud.”
- Odalis Tejada, Associate Director
Network Services and Data Center Operations, Covanta

9. Proven Strategies for Windows on AWS
Migrating Your Windows Datacenter to AWS
Sabine Blair

10. Sabine Blair, Cloud Consultant
About Me...
• Cloud Consultant with 2nd Watch for 3 years
• Systems Engineer and Architect for 10 years
• Site Reliability, Infrastructure as Code, Performance tuning and optimization
• Focus on Microsoft Windows and other Microsoft Datacenter technologies
• Certified
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect: Associate
• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator: Associate
• AWS Certified Developer: Associate

11. Original and current AWS
Premier Consulting Partner
Microsoft Workloads
Competency Holder
Managed Service Partner
100% certified engineers
and architects
Competencies:
Microsoft Workloads – SQL
Server
DevOps
Marketing & Commerce
Life Sciences
Migration
Financial Services
2nd Watch: Who are we?

12. 2nd Watch: Other services we provide
• Assessments & Cloud Readiness
• Managed Cloud
• Cost analysis
• Security / Hardening
• Operations

13. Trusted by leading global enterprises

14. Assessment
• 2nd Watch provided cloud readiness assessments to understand the
overall application and datacenter footprint
• Conducted several interviews with technology services and application
owners
• Created migration plan in order to migrate the apps in order of sensitivity
and criticality

15. Business Goal: To get out of the datacenter
Migration Project Snapshot:
• 200+ individual hosts
• 80%+ Windows based workloads
• 85%+ virtualized on VMware
• 6 month timeline

16. Definitions
• Demilitarized Zone(DMZ): the more open portion of infrastructure. DMZ systems have Internet
facing network connections and are separated from the larger environment by firewalls or Security
Groups.
• Virtual Private Cloud(VPC): Virtual network topology that closely resembles a traditional network
that you might operate in your own datacenter. Allows for allocation of self-selected private IP
addressing within user defined private
subnets. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_Introduction.htm
• Security Group (SG): Firewall rules for TCP/UDP/ICMP network protocols applied at an instance
(host) level. Both Inbound and Outbound rules can be defined.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-network-security.html
• Region: Geographic area containing multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-regions-availability-zones.html
• Availability Zone (AZ): Isolated location with an AWS region containing resources such as
instances and data storage. Akin to a physical datacenter. Each AWS Region is comprised of
multiple Availability Zones to provide High Availability of services.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-regions-availability-zones.html
• Direct Connect: a network service that provides an alternative to using the Internet to connect
customer's on premise sites to AWS.

17. Architecture Layout

18. Network Layout

19. Microsoft Applications Migrated
• SCCM
• Exchange 2007/2010
• Active Directory
• Microsoft KMS
• SQL Server
• Operating Systems
• Server 2008/2010
• Windows 7

20. Migration Strategies
• Rehost
• Redeploying virtual and/or physical hosts as-is into AWS with CloudEndure
• Allow data to sync to the cloud while host is online with Block level replication
• Offline the servers during the maintenance windows
• Re-Address, test, install monitoring and add back to the domain once regression testing
passes and receives business acceptance
• Decommission
• Decommission instances that will not be migrated to the cloud

21. Cloud Migration Cost Assessment: 6-Weeks
• A six-week assessment analyzing on-premise computing environments,
leveraging analytics tools to map current compute use and licenses to the most
cost effective solution across the public cloud.

22. Conclusion
Covanta was able to leverage AWS because it offered
• The widest range of services and technologies to support their platform
• AWS had native support for Microsoft, Oracle, Linux, .NET and SQL server
• Rapid infrastructure deployment by having the most support for Infrastructure as Code tools
(e.g Terraform and CloudFormation)
• Support for cost effective and highly available solutions

23. Q&A

24. Thank you
Sabine Blair
Cloud Consultant
sblair@2ndwatch.com
2ndwatch.com