Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - How Georgia-Pacific accelerates modernization & improves resilience (ENT324)

Summary

• Neil Sanders, Principal Technical Account Manager at AWS, and Stephen Dolan, Migration Services Specialist at AWS, discuss application modernization challenges and solutions.
• Carlos Wiley from Georgia-Pacific shares their journey towards modernization and resilience.
• The session covers the shift from on-prem to serverless and containerization, focusing on agility and operational efficiency.
• Challenges include modernizing legacy monolithic applications and building resilient cloud infrastructure.
• AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces and AWS Resilience Hub are introduced as solutions to accelerate modernization and improve resilience.
• Refactor Spaces assists in breaking down monoliths into microservices and managing traffic routing during incremental refactoring.
• Resilience Hub helps manage application resilience, providing assessments, recommendations, and integration with CI/CD pipelines.
• Georgia-Pacific's case study demonstrates the successful use of AWS services to modernize applications and improve disaster recovery processes.

Insights

• Modernization Challenges: Enterprises struggle with transforming monolithic applications into microservices due to limited knowledge from original developers and the complexity of creating a refactor environment.
• Strangler Fig and Leave and Layer Patterns: These are two best practices for modernizing applications. Strangler Fig involves incremental refactoring, while Leave and Layer adds new functionalities alongside the monolith.
• AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces: This service simplifies the transition to microservices by handling the undifferentiated heavy lifting, such as creating multi-account environments and routing traffic.
• AWS Resilience Hub: Launched in November 2021, this service helps define, track, and manage application resilience, including RTO and RPO targets, across an organization's entire application portfolio.
• Georgia-Pacific's Modernization Journey: They leveraged AWS services to refactor applications, moving from EC2 instances to microservices in containers, and improved their disaster recovery strategy using AWS Resilience Hub.
• Benefits of AWS Services: Georgia-Pacific experienced increased developer productivity, daily releases, reduced failure impact, and a 90% improvement in the speed of deployment for networking components.
• Future Plans: Georgia-Pacific aims to drive adoption of AWS services within their organization, develop infrastructure as code modules, and integrate AWS Fault Injection Simulator for serverless application testing.