Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1335871
our migration to AWS," says Wang. "This was crucial because of the timeline and the complexity of our environment." The original schedule for cloud migration was two years, including refactoring applications to run on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Following the migration, the organization began running its application and database environment on hundreds of Amazon EC2 instances. Using AWS, S&P Global Ratings created an automation framework to enable easy provisioning of new application environments. Wang says, "We built everything as code and deployed applications on our CI/CD pipelines." Spinning Up New Environments in Hours Instead of 30 Days As it moves to microservices, S&P Global Ratings will be able to meet global market demands much faster than it could in the data center. "We can spin up new application environments in a few hours instead of more than 30 days because of the automation and infrastructure-as-code model enabled by AWS," says Wang. With this new agility and speed, the organization can innovate more easily. "Since we moved 100 percent to AWS earlier this year, we have already made improvements in our development velocity. We are enhancing our CI/CD pipeline with continuous testing to improve the quality of our products," Wang says. "As user stories are being released to QA, a pre-QA environment spins up where all the automated tests are executed and results are captured. After the tests are finished, the pre-QA environment goes away. If the tests pass, then QA will accept the user stories." Avoiding Penalties by Ensuring High Availability S&P Global Ratings has improved application availability by running applications and Oracle database nodes in multiple Regions and Availability Zones, ensuring stability for critical financial applications and eliminating the outages that occurred in the data center. "We have more resilience and stability on AWS, and this will help us avoid SEC penalties due to application downtime. We have seen 100 percent uptime on our regulatory applications since migrating to AWS, and we have improved disaster recovery time by 50 percent," says Wang. "Being on AWS definitely helps us sleep better at night." The organization's ability to move faster in the cloud is also driving business expansion. "We have a goal to move closer to our global users, and we will achieve that more easily by using AWS," says Wang. "For example, we're looking at expanding to Singapore. Instead of spending 6–12 months building a data center there, we can spin up a new virtual private cloud in 5 minutes and start providing services to customers in that region very quickly. As we grow, we'll be able to expand rapidly and improve application performance by relying on AWS." Benefits of AWS ● Seamlessly migrates critical financial applications