Consolidating Insync websites from Azure to AWS
Historical Azure-to-AWS migration result
CoreLine moved Insync's Joomla websites from separate Azure hosting into its AWS environment, added application caching and CloudFront, and automated certificate renewal. The cost figures below are the project's historical monthly infrastructure figures, not current cloud price quotes.
- ~$400/month previous server baseline
- The project record lists an Azure P3v2 App Service plan at almost $400 per website at the time of migration.
- ~$76/month replacement server figure
- The record lists a t2.large EC2 instance in the London region at approximately $76 per month at that time.
- $300+/month historical saving per server
- The reported difference between those project-period server figures exceeded $300 per month.
Evidence basis: CoreLine's implementation record and project-period infrastructure pricing captured in this case study.
Scope note: Cloud products and prices change. These figures document the historical result and must not be used as a present-day AWS or Azure estimate.
CLOUD ARCHITECTURE
INFRASTRUCTURE MIGRATION
PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION
TLS AUTOMATION
Insync needed one cloud operating model for its insurance platforms and public websites.
Since all Insync (Joomla) websites were hosted on Azure the goal was to migrate them to AWS in order to reduce the number of systems that need to be monitored and maintained. Also, websites were hosted on huge P3v2 App service plans on Azure, costing almost $400 each. Still, the website was quite slow (the first load took 4-5 seconds).
Another problem was that there was no automatic service for renewing SSL certificates. So, since there was no alert system for that, Insync often had SSL errors.
Since the main goal was to migrate everything from Azure to AWS we started by migrating the DNS service to Route53. We then set up t2.large EC2 instances for each Joomla app. After adding cache to the PHP layer, the app instantly became much faster. Then, we set up CloudFront CDN in front of the app to enhance the content delivery and improved the site performance.
To resolve the SSL issue, we used AWS certificate manager and offloaded the manual work of renewing certificates to AWS. We also connected Joomla to AWS CloudFront in order to purge the CF cache automatically on website updates.
At the time of the project, the recorded t2.large cost was approximately $76 per month in the London region, reducing the historical server cost by more than $300 per month. CloudFront usage was small relative to that server-cost difference. These are project-period figures, not current AWS or Azure price quotes.
