Colin Mazzola of Wellington Management Company discussed their company's journey to migrating all workloads and infrastructure to AWS. They began initial proof of concepts in 2009 and made the decision to fully migrate in 2014. By 2017, they had migrated their first tier 1 system and as of 2018 had over 10,000 AWS resources deployed across multiple regions. Lessons learned included defining resiliency through fault domains, automation, and disaster recovery planning as well as controlling costs through tagging, monitoring, and reserved instances.

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Making the Journey to All-In
Colin L. Mazzola
Senior Managing Director & Partner
Wellington Management Company
F S V 2 0 3

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Agenda
About Wellington
Our migration timeline & approach
Lessons learned
• Resiliency
• Cost
• Management
Q&A

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Compliance disclaimer
Views expressed herein are those of the author, are based on available
information, and are subject to change without notice. Certain data
provided is that of a third party. While data is believed to be reliable, no
assurance is being provided as to its accuracy or completeness.
Companies mentioned in this presentation are shown for illustrative
purposes only, are not representative of any securities purchased, sold, or
recommended for clients. It should not be assumed that an investment in
the companies identified has or will be profitable. This is not to be
construed as investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any
specific security.

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About Wellington Management
Independent investment management firm
Only in one business—we manage money for a fee
Manage ~$1.1T on behalf of our 220+ clients located in 60+ countries
14 offices in 10 countries
Ways you might know us:
• Mutual funds we sub-advise
• Manage money for large university endowments and pension plans
~1,350 resources in IT

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Roughly ~800 business applications; >75% custom developed
Our business application tech stack
Front end
• HTML/JavaScript
• Java & .NET thick clients
Middle tier
• Java/Tomcat on Linux
• Also have Python, R,
Ruby, and many others
• Some of Windows
servers
Data
• Large, centralized
RDBMS backend
• Growing presence of
other data technologies

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Migration timeline
2009
2012
2014
2015
2017
Initial POCs
Spun up a few test
servers, built a few
internal IT
applications
First production
workloads
Analytics systems; only
used public data
“All-in” decision
Key factors: first key
manager, experience
gained over prior years
DevOps migration
Decentralized support
for most of the
infrastructure
First tier 1 system
migration
Key factor: multi-region
capabilities
2019
Shut down
data centers!

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Our AWS environment by the numbers (as of 2018/09/25)
• 10,166 AWS CloudFormation stacks
• 7,956 AWS Lambda functions
• 4,326 running Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances across five
regions
• 3,418 Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queues
• 3,235 AWS Auto Scaling groups
• 2,571 Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets with ~500M objects
totaling 1.3P of storage
• 1,894 Amazon WorkSpaces
• 438 Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances
• 362 Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) with 3,298 subnets
• 7 Amazon Redshift clusters
• … and more!

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Managing 10,000 Stacks
Infrastructure as code via AWS CloudFormation (lots of custom templates!)
Automation of the end-to-end process via ServiceNow & Jenkins

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Colos & telecom—Early days through 2014
us-east-1
Americas Hub
European Hub
Internet
Internet
SaaS Providers

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Colos & telecom—2015
us-east-1
AWS Direct Connect
10G redundant
connectivity
SaaS Providers
Internet
Americas Hub
European Hub
Colo A

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Colos & Telecom—2016
us-east-1
AWS Direct Connect
10G redundant
connectivity
SaaS Providers
…
Internet
Americas Hub
European Hub
Colo A Colo B

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Colos & telecom—2017
us-east-2 us-east-1
AWS Direct Connect
10G redundant
connectivity
SaaS Providers
…
IaaS for custom applications
Internet
Americas Hub
European Hub
Colo A Colo B
Colo C

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Colos & telecom—Current
us-east-2 us-east-1 eu-west-1
AWS Direct Connect
10G redundant
connectivity
SaaS Providers
…
IaaS for custom applications
Internet
Americas Hub
European Hub
Colo A Colo B
Colo C
Colo D

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What remains in our colos

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Lessons learned—Resiliency
Define your fault domains up front
• Always within a VPC for isolation
• Multiple Amazon EC2 instances, auto-scaling if possible
• Multiple Availability Zones (AZs)
• Cross region only if needed
• Monitor the above automatically (more on this later)
• Separation between environments (dev, test, stage, prod)

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Break glass using bastions
• Leverage bastion hosts for all login processes
EC2 1
Bastion
host
EC2 2
EC2 N
Amazon
WorkSpaces

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Lessons learned—Resiliency
Enforce resiliency patterns automatically
• Simian Army pattern is very useful
• Our “monkeys” enforce tagging, non-prod shutdown, security, and AWS Identity and Access
Management (IAM) users
• Monitor service usage
• Automate/script failure testing

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Representative monkeys

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Automated BCP

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Lessons learned—Resiliency
Be prepared for this question: “What if AWS goes down?”
• News on outages create “Amazon isn’t stable” FUD—be prepared for this
• Have your story ready; keep it simple
• Compare the approach to your current environment

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Lessons learned—Costs
Define tagging standards
• Can’t manage costs without knowing who owns what

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Lessons learned—Costs
Define a cost containment approach
• Limit who has access for expensive decisions (such as purchasing RIs)
• Most managers need to look at AWS cost reports!
• External costing tools can be quite helpful (we use CloudCheckr & Tableau)

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Cost trending

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Lessons learned—Costs
Be prepared for the lock-in and rates questions
• There is always lock in; better for it to be conscious choice
• Less confidence in multi-cloud software providers
• Still believe it is simpler & cheaper to use a single platform
• We do have optionality around moving instances to another provider

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Lessons learned—Management
Learn the lingo
• Everyone, including management, needs to know the basic terminology
• Region, AZs, Reserved Instances (RIs)
• Key services such as Amazon VPC, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon Elastic Block Store
(Amazon EBS), Amazon RDS, Amazon SQS, Amazon EMR, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon
Redshift, Amazon Aurora, Amazon WorkSpaces, Lambda, DX, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)
• Instance Types: t2.micro, m4.large, c4.xlarge, etc.
Migrate to DevOps at the same time
• No centralized DBAs/sys admins is ultimately less expensive and empowering
Journey is more difficult for fewer technical resources

27. Thank you!
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Colin Mazzola
CLMazzola@wellington.com

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