How Nab Improved Application Functionality More by Migrating to Aws Ent227

Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - How NAB improved application functionality & more by migrating to AWS (ENT227)

Summary

  • National Australia Bank (NAB) aimed to migrate 80% of their applications to the cloud by 2023 and had already achieved 71%.
  • NAB migrated Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications (OPSA) and Oracle eBusiness Suite to AWS to address end-of-life infrastructure, improve business functionality, and overcome provisioning and support challenges.
  • The migration focused on scalability, security, performance tuning, and cost savings.
  • AWS services such as RDS, Auto Scaling, S3, Athena, CloudWatch, and Parameter Store were utilized to enhance the architecture.
  • The migration led to improved SLAs, better performance, regulatory compliance, and cost savings through the use of Spot Instances and infrastructure as code.
  • Future considerations include assessing RDS Custom for Oracle and building more APIs to reduce reliance on batch file transfers.

Insights

  • NAB's migration to AWS was driven by the need for modern infrastructure, better performance, and the ability to quickly provision new environments.
  • The use of AWS services allowed NAB to create a more scalable, secure, and cost-effective environment.
  • The migration to AWS resulted in a 30% improvement in maximum processing time and near-zero downtime during patching and upgrades.
  • NAB's approach to cost savings included the strategic use of Spot Instances and automating environment creation with Terraform.
  • Security was a key consideration, with NAB ensuring encrypted connections to RDS and secure password management through AWS Parameter Store.
  • Performance tuning was critical, with adjustments made based on Oracle AWR reports and AWS RDS performance insights.
  • The migration process highlighted the importance of choosing the right AWS database service based on application compatibility and operational overhead.
  • NAB's future plans include leveraging RDS Custom for Oracle to reduce the management burden and developing APIs to facilitate continuous data flow and reduce batch processing dependencies.