City of Peterborough Accelerates with Tidal
The City of Peterborough is a city on the Otonabee River in Ontario, Canada. The city, with a population of 81,000, has operations from large multinational companies such as Siemens, Rolls-Royce Limited, and General Electric.
It is the City’s mission to shift focus to sustainability and innovation, in order to thrive in an unpredictable world economy. A high rate of population growth is expected to continue with the city projecting a 41% increase in residents by 2041. While population growth will stimulate economic activity, there will undoubtedly be higher demand for infrastructure, including IT infrastructure.
The Challenge
In its plans to promote economic development and competitiveness in this rapidly transforming global economy, the City of Peterborough wanted to ensure that the necessary IT infrastructure is in place to support the needs of its various departments. In addition to technical skills training, the IT division was tasked with ensuring that the services they provide keep pace with the growing demands of cost efficiency, security, agility, and scalability.
In addition to elevating their IT capabilities, the IT division wanted to reduce the city’s dependence on its own IT and data center assets. They were looking for a trusted partner to help the city leverage the technical benefits and scalability of the cloud in order to achieve these objectives.
The Solution
Having previously shown expertise in successfully migrating a crucial voting website to AWS in less than a week for a municipal election, Tidal was chosen to provide a migration readiness assessment on a subset of the city’s application portfolio. This involved determining the migration readiness and recommending 6R dispositions for each of those applications.
Using the Tidal Platform, proprietary discovery tools, and our data-driven migration methodology, Tidal captured the key data and information required to make informed and automated disposition recommendations.
The Details
Tidal ran City of Peterborough through a process that mostly automatically collected key information, such as:
- Infrastructure information associated with application and database servers and their dependencies
- Application source code and database analyses to determine migration difficulty
- OS and Database licensing data to inform the optimum licensing treatment within AWS EC2 and RDS instances
- Qualitative and business application attributes captured via interviews
Thereafter, Tidal compared the relative performance of the customer’s on-prem servers with AWS instance options on a normalized performance index in order to recommend the lowest cost, performance-comparable EC2 instance. This matching process incorporated the following factors: normalized CPU performance, memory usage, operating system, license portability, bursting compatibility, and cost.
Tidal helped the City of Peterborough identify approximately CAD 743,000 in savings over three years by migrating 13 applications to AWS. This involved replatforming to optimized AWS EC2 and RDS instances. Other transformative recommendations customized for the customer included refactoring applications to run on AWS Lambda and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
The Results
Using Tidal’s transformative cloud migration approach, the City of Peterborough is estimated to be able to save up to 76% by refactoring their applications and migrating to AWS. For example, by refactoring an application on a JSP/Tomcat 8.5 stack, to AWS Lambda using the Serverless Java Container pattern, the customer could reduce its monthly costs to CAD 80.63. This represents a 87.3% reduction from CAD 636.08/month if it remained on-prem.
Using Tidal we were able to rapidly assess our infrastructure and applications for migration to AWS. The data-driven insights in the platform allowed us to develop a plan and reference architecture to transform our applications, saving the city considerable time and costs versus competing assessment techniques. Additionally Tidal Calculator was able to help us predict what our costs would be for both lift & shift, and transformative migrations.
– Jamie Hagg, Manager Enterprise Technology at City of Peterborough
About Tidal
Built by AWS experts, on AWS. We are an AWS Validated Software partner and listed on AWS Marketplace. Our customers get access to multiple AWS funding programs using Tidal. Our cloud readiness assessment and 6R migration strategies complement requirements documented within the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), AWS Well-Architected Framework, and AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP).
