"Migrating from Cloud to Cloud: AWS to GCP" - Chris Prouty, Director of Technology Operations at Shoppertrak From the July 11 AWS user group event at Motorola Solutions

1. From AWS to GCP
Migrating from Cloud to Cloud
The Business Drivers, the Challenges, the Opportunities

2. Who Am I? Chris Prouty
Global Leader, DevOps - TRS
20+ years in Technology
5 years in Retail Analytics / IoT
~15 years in Financial Markets

3. Who is TRS?
Tyco Retail Services
Division of JCI Building Solutions
Retail Solutions acquired over 17 years
● Loss Prevention (2001 - Sensormatic - Boca Raton)
● Inventory (2008 - TrueVue - Irvine CA)
● Traffic (2016 - ShopperTrak - Chicago IL, 2015 - FootFall - Solihull UK)

4. ➔ Pre-acquisition (2016), ShopperTrak was an early IoT / Edge computing device solution (20+ years)
➔ (2015) Thriving business, 90k IoT devices in the field, Single Point of Failure, Tier 3 Data Center
➔ Redundant Data Center would cost ~$2M CapEx + ~$400k annual OpEx
➔ Non-starter for the business
➔ Cloud was more expensive than SPoF Co-Lo, but less expensive than 2x Co-lo plus the OpEx +
redundancy fit business model
Why Did We Go to the Cloud?

5. Cloud Strategy circa 2015

6. ➔ Deep Dive in early 2015, 11 solutions reviewed, Final group = AWS, Azure, Rackspace
➔ Azure close, but… Networking limitations (single IP per instance) , Doubts about Linux on Azure,
Limited 3rd party offerings
➔ Rackspace closer to Co-Lo model with cloud interface, concerns about long term viability
➔ Google was good for startups and dev space, but not enterprise class at the time
➔ AWS clear leader in market space - longest tenure, greatest functionality, best offering
Why Did We Choose AWS?

7. How We Explained AWS Internally

8. AWS Deployment Timeline
Vendor Discovery
5/1/15 - 8/1
Infra Setup
8/1 - 10/1
Data Acq Layer
9/22 - 11/11
Data Presentation Layer
11/16 - 3/21
Data Agg Layer
1/1 - 3/23/16
Core migration completed in 6 months. A seamless transition for our customers.

9. AWS
Opportunities
● Easy and functional resiliency / redundancy
● Speed of deployment
● No expensive stair steps to additional capacity
● Easy access to new technology for Dev Sandbox
○ Lambda, Aurora, Greengrass
● RDS! Redshift!
Challenges
● Owned 20+ years of Dev against enterprise DB
○ Tightly coupled, very latency sensitive
○ Hardware SAN IOPs hid inefficiencies
● Fear of loss of control / abstracted hardware
● Initially only IaaS
○ Expensive and inefficient use of resources
● Ability to track & understand cost
● Walmart

10. ➔ Mid 2017, Walmart pushing hard for vendors to not use AWS
◆ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/21/walmart_tells_devs_to_avoid_aws/
◆ Representative of general misgivings in the Retail space for AWS
◆ Netflix argument not finding traction
➔ Google re-doubled focus on the importance of the Cloud business
➔ An ideal strategic partnership for TRS - the omnichannel dream
➔ Timing perfect for move of other two business legs to initial As A Service offerings
Why Did We Change to Google?

11. GCP Deployment Timeline
Infra Setup, Kickoffs
11/1/17 - 1/1/18
LP aaS
12/15 - 3/1
Data Acq Layer
1/1 - 4/1
Data Presentation
Layer 1/15 - 5/15
Data Agg Layer
3/15 - 6/15/18
Core migration occurred in a same timeframe as the AWS migration but more moving pieces
Migrated from Azure

12. GCP
Opportunities
● Accelerate cloud deploy for other business legs
● Machine Learning and AI market leadership
● Greater open source culture
● BigQuery!
● Significant cost savings over AWS
Challenges
● China
● Less mature offering than AWS
● Network between AWS and GCP

13. Current
Footprint
80% GCP
5% Co Lo (Legacy UK)
15% AWS

14. GCP
What We Like
● One consistent global network
● Robust management API
● IAM - more consistent, ease of mgmt
● Security – much more robust and thought out
● Infra upgrades changes closer to seamless
● Simpler, more intuitive interface
● Cloud shell instance associated per account
● Ability to add ssh keys per instance
● Cross regionality, Kubernetes, Shared VPC
● Firewall mgmt is awesome
What We Like
● Very mature platform, THE first class citizen in
the cloud
● Highly diverse environment w/ limitless options
● Strong community knowledge base, tons of
documentation
● RDS - especially the range of DB options
AWS
Room For Improvement
● Many useful products still in Beta
● LOTS of VPN inconsistencies + other network basics
● CloudSQL not as diverse as RDS
Room For Improvement
● Server retirement tends to be impactful
● No live migration
● Many regions require conx via VPN internally
● Security can be convoluted
● Storage stability

15. Questions?