Converge AWS Cloud Migration Services

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About Wisk Aero:

Wisk Aero is an advanced air mobility company dedicated to delivering safe, everyday flight for everyone. The company is backed by the Boeing Company and Kitty Hawk Corporation.

Executive Summary:

Wisk Aero has developed the first-ever autonomous electrical vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft and is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build high performance compute (HPC) clusters to run simulations. The company relies on HPC to run computationally intensive and complex simulations, each of which uses thousands of CPU cores. Purchasing on-premises computers for its HPC workload presented challenges, such as cost and managing enough CPU cores for peak runs. Wisk Aero migrated its HPC clusters to AWS to improve job runtime, achieve scalable storage, and drive improved economics.

Client Challenge:

Wisk Aero is an aviation company focused on developing eVTOL aircraft and revolutionizing mobility through quiet, fast, and clean air travel. The company has over 10 years of experience, has locations around the world, and is backed by the Boeing Company and Kitty Hawk Corporation.

To study the in-flight airflow, Wisk Aero engineers perform computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations using in-house and NASA CFD applications, such as OVERFLOW and FUN3D. Wisk Aero focuses more on using CFD than traditional aircraft builders because CFD supports rapid design iteration as the team explores different aircraft designs and architectures, especially in the early phase of the design process.

The use of CFD simulations gives engineers a clear understanding of the aircraft’s expected performance under various loading and boundary conditions. Because of the novel design of Wisk Aero’s sixth-generation four-seat selfflying eVTOL, it is not possible to use previous simulations or design models.

Wisk Aero engineers rely on HPC to run these computationally intensive and complex CFD simulations, each using thousands of CPU cores. To purchase on-premises computers for these HPC workloads, Wisk Aero would need to spend more on hardware that might go entirely unused when not running at peak jobs. Wisk Aero also had to address the increased operational overhead of managing physical hardware as the size of the on-premises cluster increased.

To solve these challenges, Wisk Aero turned to the AWS HPC team and Converge Technology Solutions (Converge), an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, to assist in migrating the company’s HPC simulations to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload.

Converge Solution:

The Converge client-executive supporting Wisk Aero for its on-premises infrastructure introduced Converge’s Cloud Platforms team and its AWS offerings to the engineering manager of core infrastructure at Wisk Aero. Converge shared a similar use case when Converge—using its AWS Competency Program, which highlights AWS technical expertise and specialization—helped the client successfully migrate its HPC workload to AWS.

Converge, alongside the AWS HPC team, created a pilot environment on AWS for the Wisk Aero team. The fully funded environment helped Wisk Aero to benchmark performance of the Amazon EC2 Hpc6a Instances—HPC instances powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors—and run the necessary software to simulate a smooth transition to AWS. In addition to meeting technical and performance requirements, Wisk Aero worked with Converge to make sure the financial model for using AWS was also part of the pilot deliverables.

After the successful pilot, Wisk Aero chose to use AWS for another round of CFD simulations for its eVTOL aircraft. Now, Wisk Aero can build HPC clusters on the fly and achieve a significant performance increase over running simulations on premises. It uses purpose-built Amazon EC2 Hpc6a Instances to achieve the desired scalability by accessing CPU architectures alongside AWS ParallelCluster, which helps users to quickly build HPC compute environments on AWS.

Wisk Aero uses Amazon FSx Lustre—fully managed shared storage built on the world’s most popular high-performance file system—for high-performance, scalable storage for HPC compute workloads. The company runs these workloads on AWS GovCloud (US), designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads and address the most stringent US government security and compliance requirements. AWS GovCloud satisfies the compliance requirements for the software from NASA that Wisk Aero uses. In addition, test models on AWS GovCloud showed a 10–20 percent improvement in runtime compared with the on-premises solution.

Results & Benefits:

Wisk Aero can benefit from cloud elasticity to help drive better economics, instead of expanding its physical footprint in its colocated data center. Wisk Aero’s autonomous eVTOL aircraft is the first-ever candidate for type certification by the Federal Aviation Administration and aims to make it possible for passengers to skip traffic and get to their destinations faster.

By migrating its HPC to AWS, the company can run simulations more efficiently and at a lower cost. “Using AWS, we quickly scaled and added the needed on-demand compute power for the CFD team, compared with the months required and significant capital to build and scale an on-premises HPC cluster,” says Colin Haubrich, head of IT at Wisk Aero.

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About 23andMe:

23andMe wants to disrupt the healthcare experience by building a personalized health and wellness experience that caters uniquely to the individual by harnessing the power of their DNA. 23andMe pioneered direct access to genetic information as the only company with multiple FDA clearances for genetic health reports.

23andMe built the world’s largest crowdsourced platform for genetic research, with 80 percent of our customers electing to participate. This platform allows us to accelerate research at an unprecedented scale, while providing information back to participants. Our Therapeutics team leverages this research platform to identify and develop drug targets rooted in human genetics across a spectrum of disease areas, including oncology, respiratory, and cardiovascular diseases.

Executive Summary:

23andMe, Inc. (23andMe) is a privately held biotechnology company based in Sunnyvale, California.  It is best known for providing genetic testing to retail customers.

23andMe collects billions of data points. The medical breakthroughs this data can unlock are limitless. However, legacy storage systems hinder medical research and innovation as they were not designed for today’s modern workflows, that require multiple and often simultaneous access to data. Given the company’s current growth trajectory, 23andMe was challenged to find a solution that is not only able to address their challenges today, but also support them as they scale in the future.

Client Challenge:

23andMe had most of their non-research computing infrastructure on-premises in a high-performance computing (HPC) environment. Their Cloud Engineering team, SKY, had previously investigated migrating the HPC cluster, used for genomics research, to the cloud. However, cloud storage cost, home grown tooling, managing data locality and ownership led the company to continue investing in their on-premises cluster.

 In July of 2020 the SKY team was tasked to build out a migration plan to the cloud for the HPC cluster. They had to develop an architectural design that would address the filesystem and data requirements as well as a design that made financial sense.

It was clear that moving the HPC cluster to AWS would address current challenges of physically maintaining hardware with a limited staff and would reduce the time needed to add compute and storage resources. However, addressing the economics of HPC storage in the cloud and the flexibility of a file system was a big concern.

The SKY team also needed to ensure they could address the research teams concerns of a unified interface for one time and batch job runs analysis and a shared file system for data.

23andMe had already ported some of their jobs from a POSIX filesystem to AWS S3 so a key requirement for the future filesystem would be support of POSIX, Object and Block storage.  As part of the solution, 23andMe would also need the ability to rapidly provision file systems without the need to re-configure the environment each time. Additionally, they needed a filesystem that would allow them to preserve users home directories during this process.

Addressing the latency concerns was going to come down to performance testing, however addressing how the 23andMe researchers submit jobs, store and access data and improve the HPC research cluster that was built on old tooling and processes was going to require a mix of AWS native services and third party solutions.

Converge Solution:

Converge leveraged the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) to build the business case for change and provide funding that would help accelerate and de-risk the migration project.

During the assess phase of the MAP process, issues around managing the home directories presented a  file system challenge. After some initial review of native and 3rd-party options, Converge introduced Weka, an AWS Technology Partner solution available via the AWS Marketplace to the Sky team.

Storing and analyzing large data sets in the cloud, whether it is next-generation sequencing, imaging, or microscopy requires a modern approach for faster insights and better economics. Weka would provide 23andMe a unified file system, accelerate time to insights by eliminating the performance bottlenecks across the Life Sciences data pipeline, while significantly reducing the cost and complexity of managing data at scale.

After a successful POV (proof of value) 23andMe selected WekaFS data management platform to underpin the AWS solution stack.

Results & Benefits:

23andMe made a strategic decision to move their HPC production environment to AWS. The technology collaboration with Converge, Weka and AWS account teams allowed 23andMe to take full advantage of the flexibility and scalability that AWS has to offer, while driving down infrastructure cost and management overhead. Specifically, 23andMe realized the following benefits:

– Dynamically scale performance and capacity up and down based on real-time application requirements utilizing auto-scaling groups, while controlling AWS infrastructure spend on instances

– Support mixed workloads for a multi-petabyte dataset with zero tuning needs

– Seamless integration of flash and S3 storage into a single namespace that scales infinitely

– Access the same dataset across multiple protocols (POSIX, NFS, SMB and S3) at the same time

– Maintain flexibility, as Weka is completely software-defined enabling them to adopt new technologies as they emerge on-premises, hybrid, and in the cloud

With their HPC platform now in AWS, 23andMe can accelerate research without worrying about resource availability, performance, or data management issues.

“Weka was absolutely a slam dunk,” said Arnold De Leon, Operations Manager at 23andMe. “Moving to the cloud comes with a new set of requirements. We (23andMe) needed a solution that was compatible with our existing applications and gave us the performance we required.  We chose Weka because the protocols just ran, scale in and scale just worked, and we haven’t found the limits of their performance.”

About Sunkist Growers

Sunkist Growers, Incorporated is an American citrus growers’ non-stock membership cooperative composed of 6,000 members from California and Arizona. It is currently headquartered in Santa Clarita, California.

Sunkist Growers (Sunkist) is the largest fresh produce shipper in the United States, the most diversified citrus processing and marketing operation in the world, and one of California’s largest landowners. They market fresh oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruits, tangerines, and strawberries to 12 states and three Canadian provinces from 6,000 growers in California and Arizona.

Through licensing agreements, Sunkist has rented its trademark to other firms for marketing more than 600 mainly citrus-flavored products including soft drinks & juice drinks, vitamins, and jellies & candies, in more than 50 countries.

Executive Summary

Sunkist Growers had an impending hardware refresh of aging equipment in a colocation facility as well as the need to re-platform a business-critical application. Given the significant investment in new hardware, Sunkist decided to look at the economics of migrating to public cloud.

Based on their strong, trusted relationship with Converge for services including colocation, connectivity, and disaster recovery, Sunkist engaged Converge to help determine the potential TCO benefits they could realize by migrating to public cloud.

Because Sunkist had very aggressive timelines for implementation and wanted to ensure minimum disruption in operational support for the re-platform of the business-critical application, they decided to look at VMware Cloud on AWS.

Converge Solution

Working closely with the VMware and AWS technical teams, Converge executed a 14-day proof of concept, along with a complete TCO analysis detailing the acceleration of Sunkist’s cloud migration by implementing VMware Cloud on AWS. They would realize operational consistency with on-prem SDDC, seamless large-scale workload portability, and direct access to AWS-native services.

To enable Sunkist to move from proof of concept to production quickly and successfully, Converge provided a hybrid cloud readiness assessment, hybrid cloud integration services, and a review of their VMware Cloud on AWS managed services.

After Sunkist determined a VMware Cloud on AWS hybrid cloud solution would meet their business goals and drive TCO savings, the Converge delivery team leveraged VMware HCX to accelerate their migration to the cloud. Converge provided AWS operational support and implemented AWS Direct Connect, as well as S3 native services, as part of the solution.

Sunkist was able to leverage existing third-party offerings including Citrix, via AWS Marketplace, and Veeam in their new hybrid cloud solution. Additionally, Converge was selected as the VMware Cloud on AWS managed service provider for their service desk.

Results & Benefits

The decision to implement VMware Cloud on AWS allowed Sunkist to migrate their business-critical applications to the cloud more efficiently than standing up new hardware in their colocation. This solution will provide a three-year TCO savings of 25%.

About Company:

A global bank is the largest source of multilateral development financing for Latin America and the Caribbean, supporting economic development, social development, and regional integration by lending to governments and government agencies, including State corporations. The Bank is owned by 48 sovereign states, which are its shareholders and members. It provides loans, grants, guarantees, policy advice, and technical assistance to the public and private sectors of its 26 borrowing member countries.

Executive Overview:

The Bank has gathered structured and unstructured documentation regarding its various initiatives and projects over many years. Valuable insights and observations have been captured within this vast body of documentation around the context of “Lessons Learned”. They needed a solution that would quickly search tens of thousands of documents and surface the “Lessons Learned” to help ensure future success. Critically, a multi-lingual solution was required, as the Bank operates in four languages (English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish).

Converge was engaged to migrate the Bank’s legacy application and build an internal search engine specific to their needs. An outdated legacy system written in J2EE on IBM WebSphere Application Server was found to be unwieldy and lack the agility to scale to the processing and data analytic demands of new projects and ventures.

The Bank had previously successfully partnered with Converge on a cloud migration project for an AI-driven advanced search application rewritten for cloud deployment, to help locate Subject Matter Expert staff members with tacit knowledge within the Bank. Deep Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and additional artificial intelligence techniques drive the underlying document parsing, indexing, and ranking. These AI technologies create an autonomous pipeline for intuitive, accurate, context-aware searches. Converge was selected to repurpose these AWS-based AI capabilities and user experience toward the migration and modernization effort of the development of “Lessons Learned”.

Converge Solution:

The application was migrated from the Bank’s existing on-premise IBM WebSphere Application Server to AWS. Converge developed a system which provides a cross-language search experience that identifies key insights and knowledge (“Lessons Learned”) from prior financing projects. The team leveraged several neural network models to provide query expansion and semantic search across the four different languages. Customized word2vec word embeddings and transformer models are the AI/ML engine of this solution.

The four-language “Lessons Learned” search engine provides contextual, intelligent, and accurate searches using and training AI & machine learning models. It includes an administrative dashboard with “likes”, general activity metrics, and case definition for integration with other services.

The system delivers advanced AI/ML features for Boolean Searches, prioritized search algorithms, search by objectives, similar lessons, and semantic queries, by leveraging many AWS services, including core AWS services of API Gateway, Elasticsearch, and SageMaker.

Results & Benefits:

The Converge team delivered a revolutionary user experience in search technology for the Bank.  With one click, users can identify similar and related lessons across four languages, with a search powered by cutting-edge deep learning models.

The fully functional API also serves content across numerous services at the Bank. This AWS-native application uses infrastructure-as-code for DevOps, is fully integrated with bank ETL pipelines, and is automatically updated using state-of-the-art DataOps and ModelOps processes.

The Bank has high hopes this custom trainable Lessons Learned quad-lingual search engine can be expanded to serve multiple AI/ML models of a host of applications across the Bank.

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About QUODD:

QUODD Financial Information Services is a leading provider of financial market data and information analysis tools for the wealth management industry. QUODD’s real-time, interactive data workstation is equipped with robust tools that enable wealth managers to easily analyze market data to derive and capitalize on market insights.

In addition, QUODD’s direct and normalized data offering can be seamlessly integrated into a firm’s existing technology applications, including other third-party software. This gives firms cost-effective, flexible access to market data from all asset classes around the globe.

Executive Summary:

QUODD Financial Information Services, a Financeware company, is a global financial market data provider. QUODD strives to provide affordable, comprehensive financial market data to their clients.

QUODD, like many IT organizations, leveraged a managed services provider with colocation services for their IT infrastructure. Their applications were deployed on a mixture of virtual machines on VMware hypervisor and stand- alone servers on Intel hardware. The nature of QUODD’s financial business application requires a high-quality, low-latency, Multicast IP distribution network. This allows QUODD to provide their customers with real-time market data.

Client Challenge:

QUODD’s current IT infrastructure strategy was too costly to support their growth and acquisition initiatives. The on-premise hardware budgeting and refresh cycles was not the best financial model for their capacity requirements. They also wanted to accelerate the modernization of their proprietary applications and look for innovation opportunities which were limited by their current colocation partners and managed service providers.

QUODD needed to find a solution that allowed them to reduce the operational cost related to their six datacenters and be flexible enough to support new company acquisitions as well as divestitures. QUODD had considered public cloud as a solution; however, their requirement for low latency and support for multi-cast network streams limited their options.

Converge Solution:

Gregory Reisert, a Converge Client Executive with an extensive market data experience, identified that a traditional IT solution was not aligned with QUODD’s future growth goals. Converge recommended Amazon Web Services as the cloud provider of choice due to the fact that AWS could address QUODD’s strategic goals around company growth, improved EBDITA, and innovation driven by modernization.

Converge identified the key to successfully migrating QUODD’s current workload was support of multi-cast network streams and an education and operational model that established a comfortable timeline for migration and use of AWS.

The Converge AWS specialist team quickly established why AWS was the best solution by conducting a proof of concept of AWS Transient Gateway Services to address the multi-cast network streams requirement and engaging the AWS Financials Services team who were able to demonstrate why selecting AWS as their public cloud provider would help them meet their innovation goals.

Converge created a migration plan that included an initial assessment and discovery session that produced a comprehensive ROI output for the client to ensure the financial benefits would be realized.

A prescriptive learning program was created for QUODD which included items such as an AWS Immersion Day to base-line their team’s knowledge on the primary AWS services that would be used and Converge’s Cloud Advisory program so cost optimization and governance best practices were implemented early.

The overall migration plan included Landing Zone creation, use of AWS services such as S3 & EBS for storage, AWS GuardDuty for threat detection, AWS CloudWatch, & CloudTrail for monitoring & logging.

Results & Benefits:

Now that they are on AWS, QUODD provides enhanced market data services to its customers. Innovating with AWS has also extended to their customer facing applications which are now available in AWS Marketplace.

The AWS migration plan created by Converge for QUODD:

– Eliminated capital expenditures associated with hardware refreshes

– Improved security, compliance & operational resilience (AWS Shared Security Model, consistent monitoring & logging)

– Provides a modernization platform that leverages AWS innovation in financial services and potential partnership with market data providers in AWS

– Supports a flexible IT platform that supports organic growth and acquisition and eliminates stranded IT cost associated to divestitures

About Company:

Every second of the day, tens of thousands of songs begin to play in every corner of the world, creating trillions of performance transactions each year. Most songs have multiple rights owners of composers, writers, lyricists, and publishers, each with their specific complex ownership percentages, payment instructions, and tax distribution details.

A Performance Rights Organization (PRO) owned and run by its members is the world leader in performance royalties.  The Company licenses songs & scores to the businesses that play them publicly. They distribute the money as royalties and use cutting-edge technology to process over one trillion performances every year, more than any PRO in the world.

Executive Overview:

The rise in digital consumption places tremendous strain on the Company’s data center with finite processing capacity. The ever-increasing complexity of performance rights licensing, rapid digital transformation, diversification of distribution channels, proliferation of intermediaries, and disruptions from new competitors propelled the Company to embark on their cloud journey to achieve necessary agility, scalability, and economy.

The Company needed a capable trusted partner to help them navigate the increased complexity of performance rights licensing, rapid digital transformation, diversification of distribution channels, proliferation of intermediaries, and disruption of new competitors. To be truly successful in their mission, the Company must also succeed in advancing their agile development processes, modern cloud architecture, development techniques, continuous integration continuous delivery tooling, robust security-first mindset, automated testing, strong cloud economics, and a sophisticated DevOps culture.

Converge Solution:

In March 2017, Converge worked with the Company to build a “Cloud-Native Matching Engine” proof of technology (PoT). This produced an impressive Python application, showcasing the enormous potential of AWS.

In September 2017, Converge kicked off the successful development of the Company’s first cloud-native International Distribution Application (IDA) to process hundreds of millions of payment records for $300M+ of revenue from around the world.

With these and other successes, Converge completed an Enterprise Cloud Advisory and Migration Strategy Project with recommendations approved by the Company’s Board to adopt the All-In-Cloud strategy. This began a three-year effort to completely leave their data centers.

In 2019 and 2020, we helped revitalize the agile application development processes at the Company and led many AWS-native application development projects, including: Online Member Enrollment; Cloud-Based Payment Gateway; Cue Sheet Processing System; Enterprise Authentication, Authorization, & Auditing with AWS Cognito; Enterprise ElasticSearch Services; Member Access Portal Modernization WebSphere WAS to AWS; Enterprise DevOps Center of Excellence & Platform Engineering; and QA Automated Testing.

The Company will have completed its All-In-Cloud journey on schedule in 2021.

Results & Benefits:

The Company found the right partner in Converge as they embarked on their digital transformation. Their goal was not only to migrate to the cloud, but also to build modern AWS-native applications. They are succeeding in advancing their agile development processes, modern development techniques, continuous integration/deployment tooling, advance security, automated testing, strong cloud economics, and sophisticated DevOps culture. As a consulting service provider, Converge has become a trusted advisor for the Company.

About Company:

A financial market Self-Regulatory Organization (SRO) is dedicated to protecting investors and safeguarding market integrity that facilitates vibrant capital markets. The Company provides regulatory services by contract to NYSE, NYSE MKT, NYSE Arca, NASDAQ, NASDAQ Options Market, NASDAQ OMX PHLX, NASDAQ OMX BX, ISE, the Boston Options Exchange (BOX), the EDGA and EDGX Exchanges and Direct Edge®. As such, the Company has surveillance oversight of more than 90% of the listed equities market. They also provide regulatory services to the Chicago Board Options Exchange® (CBOE®) and C2 Options Exchange (C2).

Executive Overview:

Applying a variety of data-gathering techniques, a financial self-regulatory organization (Company) works to uncover insider trading and any strategies used to gain an unfair advantage. The Company invests in innovative technology to build sophisticated surveillance systems, process extraordinary amounts of data, and work with cutting-edge applications, programs, and hardware.

The Company’s surveillance workspace system is a key brokerage firm regulatory system providing active surveillance for financial operations and sales practice activities. The legacy system was a highly complex, decade-old proprietary system written in J2EE on IBM WebSphere Application Server and Oracle RDBMS. This system lacked the ability to adapt quickly to the ever-changing business models of financial firms or the dramatic increase in corresponding data volume.

Converge Solution:

To handle the complexity of their legacy system, Converge worked with the Company to migrate their surveillance workspace system using a two-phase approach.

Phase 1: Modernize the J2EE application and migrate to AWS, and allow the data layer, including Oracle RDBMS to remain on premise.

Phase 2: Further refactor the app with new data drivers and replace the Oracle DB and other data services with AWS-native data services to remove all dependency on on-premise infrastructures.

Results & Benefits:

The Company was able to entirely remove IBM WebSphere and Oracle from the architecture of the application. It now operates as an auto-scalable, AWS-native system with significant advances in price-performance and business agility. Since 2007, Converge has been and continues to be a trusted technology partner to the Company, providing thought leadership in both technology and regulatory domain expertise. The successful migration of the surveillance workspace system aligns well with the Company’s All-In-AWS Strategy.