KO TECHNOLOGIES
AN ELEVATE & INNOVATE MIGRATION
Our elevate & innovate VMWare to AWS cloud migration strategy was a major success for LNER, a leading train operator. This multi-year program not only facilitated the migration but also significantly supercharged innovation, new technology adoption, cloud maturity, and collaboration across their entire organization.
To complement the AWS infrastructure, we implemented Datadog across servers, the network, and synthetic tests. This allowed for precise forecasting of potential issues and the ability to drill down to root causes with high accuracy.
Official Partner
The Client
LNER (London North Eastern Railway) is the current publicly-owned British train operating company that runs the majority of long-distance inter-city services on the East Coast Main Line (ECML). It connects London King’s Cross with major cities in the East of England, Yorkshire, North East England, and Scotland, including Leeds, York, Newcastle, and Edinburgh, using a modern fleet of Azuma trains. The name is a direct revival of the historic London and North Eastern Railway, one of the UK’s “Big Four” railway companies famous for iconic trains like the Flying Scotsman between 1923 and 1948.
Name
Train company serving London and the North East
Turnover
£1 Billion per annum
Location
United Kingdom
KO Technologies delivered a fully automated Datadog implementation across our entire infrastructure, including seamless SNMP monitoring. We now have complete visibility with zero manual effort—an absolute game-changer.
Train/Transport Lead
Challenges
- 2 Year time limit to vacate the VMWare datacentre.
- This organisation has many legacy systems & processes which need to be understood in order to migrate successfully to AWS.
- Many processes are manual and require human intervention to operate.
- Legacy and ageing infrastructure operating systems.
- Waterfall & Legacy ways of working.
- No observability platforms.
- No automation & lack of documentation.
- Operational time & costs are high for server patching.
- Microsoft Licensing Costs are high.
- Third party integrations and mainframe systems require modernisation.
Solutions
- AWS Landing Zones
AWS account structure created using the Terraform Account Factory.
- Image Factory
infrastructure to immutable, secure & scalable EC2.
- Elevated & Innovate Migration
Replaced legacy FTP with S3 Transfer Family.
- Elevated & Innovate Migration
New storage gateway to allow SMB access to users.
- Elevated & Innovate Migration
Split Horizon DNS for secure external and internal DNS resolution.
- Data Lake
Fully automated creation of Lake formation and Datalake capability.
- Data & Database migration
Combination of database migration and restore to RDS. 20TB of data moved to S3.
- Active Directory and Certificates
Implemented a modern AWS ACM and Private Certificate Authority capability – integrated with AD, Intune and Entra.
- Windows Scheduled Tasks
Modernised to Lambda functions.
- Digital Workplaces
Workspaces to enhance security and make it easier for business users to access private systems.
- Next Gen Firewall
Fortigate Firewall deployment. We created a secure network to allow client VPN and cross VPC access.
- Github & HashiCorp
powered DevOps practices.
- Datadog Observability
Introduced the infrastructure metrics and synthetic test observability to central infrastructure services.
Results
Speed to innovations is vastly reduced by delivering a modern migration to AWS. We have reduced time to market by 75% by deploying high impact automation.
Teams collaborate seamlessly with the unified Tools and enhanced Devops Techniques.
Modern scalable infrastructure, rather than static and operational burdened servers.
Enhance Observability with Datadog – increasing service levels and lowering time to identify problems.
Tools Used
- AWS
- DATADOG
- TERRAFORM
- TERRAGRUNT
- PACKER
- GITHUB
- PYTHON
- GOLANG
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