Cloud Migration Challenges
Minsait is the digital transformation specialist company and part of the Indra Group.
The firm is one of Spain’s leading IT services and transformation companies and operates across 100 countries worldwide. Minsait has experience across cloud, security, payments and combined physical and digital channels, so it can provide the most innovative technology to drive businesses and support innovation in public sector organizations alike, generating a positive impact on society.
For the Minsait team, helping customers migrate to the cloud is a key component in their digital transformation initiatives. For a tier-one telecoms company, this meant a move to Google Cloud. The customer had a MongoDB Enterprise deployment in their data center, and the team at Minsait had to consider how to migrate this implementation into the cloud as well.
For Minsait, the key goals of this project were to manage costs and maintain control over the deployment. When it came to MongoDB, Minsait and their customer had two options – move to MongoDB’s Atlas service, or consider an alternative path. For Luis Antonio Juanino Blasco, Product Director on the project, getting the right advice was essential.
Multi-tiered Approach Leveraging Alternatives to MongoDB Atlas
Blasco and his team turned to Percona for independent advice around how to achieve migrating to the cloud with their customer, and what the options were for the implementation. Percona offered a solution that included building a MongoDB infrastructure in the cloud using Percona Operator for MongoDB, migrating them to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), training on how to manage it, and providing support. Percona Managed Services team uses PMM to monitor, manage and optimize their database instances, and can manage this as well.
Rather than committing to MongoDB Atlas, Minsait and Percona provided a software and services solution enabling Minsait to run MongoDB in the cloud. The solution included Percona Managed Services, Percona Support with Percona Server for MongoDB, and the Percona Operator for MongoDB as an alternative.
Percona Operator for MongoDB is an open source software extension that automates the entire lifecycle of cloud-native MongoDB database operations on Kubernetes rather than relying on a cloud database-as-a-service that is locked to a specific provider. Deploying MongoDB on Kubernetes with Percona MongoDB Operator was significantly more cost-effective for the customer from an infrastructure perspective, while Percona Server for MongoDB provides required features such as physical backup capabilities and enhanced security at no additional cost that are otherwise only available in the enterprise edition of MongoDB.
Working with Percona
Minsait and Percona developed an end-to-end solution for the customer based on source-available and open source software options, while the Percona Managed Services team collaborated with Minsait and the customer’s IT teams to address the challenges of migrating to the cloud. Minsait also used Percona Managed Services to assist with maintenance during the initial six months of the project going live and to provide knowledge transfer about the solution.
Following the completion of the six-month project, Percona provided support to Minsait and the customer for any escalation issues that might arise, helping the customer team take ownership of the project for the future.
Percona solutions are free from vendor lock-in and can be run on any infrastructure in the future, as needed. For the customer, this means that they can stay in control of their decisions around their technology platforms over time, rather than being beholden to any one vendor or supplier. For Minsait, the project could be delivered at a significantly lower cost compared to other providers, while hitting the customer’s requirements around flexibility, speed, and service.