Growing your customer base equals higher revenue, but it can also push your data center to its limit and impact service delivery—a challenge that can be resolved with the right cloud infrastructure that delivers scalability and ease of deployment.
Cloud provides operational efficiencies and facilitates richer digital services, giving businesses the ability to deliver personalized customer experiences. Many are realizing this potential, with 85% of organizations expected to embrace a cloud-first strategy by 2025, according to research by Gartner.1 It further predicts that at least 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms by 2025, compared with 30% in 2021.
Without cloud-native architectures and technologies, these organizations would not be able to fully execute on their digital goals. They also need a cloud infrastructure that is scalable and resilient to support their business as it grows.
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One organization, Redcat, understands this well. The Melbourne, Australia-based company provides an integrated hospitality IT platform that encompasses a point-of-sale (POS) solution with kitchen management and reporting services for cafes, restaurants and multisite franchisees. It also facilitates loyalty campaigns, online ordering and data analytics.
With an expanding online clientele due to COVID-19, Redcat faced significant limitations running these solutions in a traditional collocated data center. The hosting system lacked scalability and required the company to go through tedious processes to procure new hardware. The ability to scale seamlessly is critical, as Redcat manages loyalty programs for a clientele with millions of members, who generate significantly heavy traffic during sales promotions.
With its growth held back by a hosting solution that could not deal with spikes in volume, Redcat knew it needed a modern cloud architecture. It decided to move its Linux and Windows workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS), opting to go with the cloud vendor because it was able to support mixed software environments.
AWS also offered capabilities Redcat needed out of the box, with an extensive Linux support structure, and was able to scale in a way that Redcat’s previous hosting solution could not. AWS Premier Consulting Partner Rackspace Technology was brought in to help rearchitect Redcat’s Windows applications and move the infrastructure onto AWS.
The project was immense, involving customer migrations, but Rackspace Technology navigated the migration with 100% uptime.
Amazon Elastic Block Store was deployed to move Redcat’s on-premises workloads to the cloud, with high-performance block storage for mission-critical applications. Amazon Lambda also was rolled out to orchestrate Amazon Simple Queue Service, allowing messages to be sent and stored between software components at any volume.
In addition, Redcat uses AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory to enable directory-aware workloads and resources to tap managed AD in the cloud. Built on actual Microsoft AD, the AWS service does not require data to be synchronized or replicated from the existing AD to the cloud. Users can choose to deploy standard AD administration tools and leverage built-in AD features such as Group Policy and single sign-on. With AWS Managed Microsoft AD, Redcat can join Amazon EC2 instances to their domain.
Innovation Made Easy With the Right Infrastructure
AWS’s ability to effortlessly handle Windows-Linux architecture has proved essential for Redcat, driving innovation between the two software platforms. The company uses Linux on AWS for its loyalty, ordering and analytics applications, while Microsoft Remote Desktop Services enables remote apps to be published where customers can access Redcat.
Now that it is on AWS, Redcat can easily add resources to its Windows systems via a self-service and on-demand model. This is a far cry from its previous hosting environment, where it had to go through an approval process to add a single CPU, which held up operations.
To further ensure its applications remain up and running, Redcat uses Amazon CloudWatch to monitor its services. The AWS tool allows the company to identify causes of slowdowns and other performance issues. CloudWatch’s tracking capabilities are especially valuable for troubleshooting, as Redcat integrates with many customer-built and third-party systems.
Moving to an AWS cloud infrastructure has provided Redcat with not only a robust and resilient operational environment but one that can also quickly scale up capacity to support resource-intensive events. In addition, integrating services on AWS is simple and seamless, allowing Redcat to easily connect customers’ POS systems to its entry points and push data to their analytics platforms, including those not running on AWS.
The cloud platform has proved to be an ideal fit for Microsoft workloads, especially for organizations that run an open architecture with other non-Windows workloads. More important, operating on an AWS infrastructure has bolstered Redcat’s ability to retain existing customers and gain new ones.
1 “Gartner Says Cloud Will Be the Centerpiece of New Digital Experiences,” Gartner, Nov. 10, 2021
