Why did Coca-Cola, a beverage company needed AWS??
Case study on Coca-Cola migrating to AWS
First of all, to understand this case study, you need to know about AWS.
Brief Introduction to AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers — including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.
Why Coca Cola needs AWS
We all know that Coca Cola is one of the largest beverage company. Their main product is CocaCola drink. But many of you didnt know that CocaCola company has 500+ brands and operates in over 200+ countries.
Yes, some of the big brands of CocaCola Company are CocaCola, Sprite, Fanta, MinuteMaid, Georgia Coffee, Costa Coffe, Fuez tea etc. So CocaCola company maintains many websites. And one thing you all need to know is CocalCola spends billions of dollars for advertising. In 2018, it spent around 4.24 bn for advertising.
In the year 2014, the company migrated all its workloads to AWS because of a certain incident. CocaCola advertises in various occasions. One such occasion is Superbowl game. Superbowl game is the biggest championship game in USA. Everybody loves it. During this time, advertising is must for CocaCola company. During this period, website hits are high. At that time, all the workloads are in on-premise datacentre. Before the superbowl game, they estimated the load and launched 10x extra servers. But finally, during the game, they got more number of hits and all the servers were saturated. They were constantly rebooting the systems and atlast, it became a total mess.
So, they have decided to migrate their workloads to cloud. At that time (and even now), the major cloud provider is AWS.
Business Case
Initial estimates showed that cloud costs 10% more expensive than that of on-premise hardware. Then they rethinked their operations and they were able to save around 20% of their costs.
Problems with on-premise
- Fixed capacity. Scaling servers is very tough for on-premise workloads
- Cost is very high and there is no metered billing. You have to estimate the total cost and pay. If the traffic is very less, then its a huge loss
- Restrictive technical environment.
- Lack of isolation. If one is affected,it may affect other servers.
- Maintenance window. To check all the servers, you should keep the website under maintenance for long time which is big loss as we can loose customers.
- Rolling updates is too slow in on-premise workloads
This leads to the migration to AWS Cloud
Advantages of AWS public cloud
- Autoscaling
- Pay-as-you-go subscription
- Automation
- CloudFormation (Infrastructure as Code)
- Secutity
AWS Services used by CocaCola:
Simple Storage Service (S3):
Most of the websites of brands of CocaCola are static websites. So they migrated these websites to S3. This reduced the cost tremendously.
CloudFormation:
They used this to write scripts for their infrastrucutre. They started building more stacks for various use cases.
Splunk:
It delivers application lifecycle intelligence which enables you to track every code check-in, build, test pass, and deployment in real-time. They used this software for Devops practices.
Elastic Beanstalk:
This is the most important service that the company used. First we need to know about the service
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.
You can simply upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. At the same time, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time.
The main important feature of elastic beanstalk is its auto-scaling feature. It increases the number of servers when the load is high and decreases when its low. We can also set the minimum and maximum amount of servers according to our cost budget.
Other important feature of beanstalk is zero downtime deployments. That means the website never goes down.
IAM:
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely. Through IAM, we can create many accounts. So, CocaCola created separate account for each brand. This gives you isolation. This has lots of advantages. As each brand is associated with an account, it has its own bill.
CocaCola architecture on AWS
Conclusion
By migrating to AWS, The Coca-Cola Company achieved 40 percent operational savings, coupled with an 80 percent reduction in IT help desk tickets due to added automation.
Thank you everyone 💕
