KELLOGG’S ON CLOUD: A KELLOGG COMPANY -AWS CASE STUDY
Kellogg’s, what’s that?
The Kellogg Company (also referred as Kellogg’s) is an American multinational food manufacturing company. Kellogg’s produces cereal and convenience foods, Corn Flakes , Froot Loops, Special K and Pringles are some of the widely popular Kellogg’s product.
Why Cloud ?
Kellogg Company was earlier using a traditional on premises Relational Data Base for data analysis and modeling. To analyze their data is a very crucial part for any company’s growth. It was also important for Kellogg to observe their data closely, every trade they made, analyze their data and run some complex simulations to predict the outcomes of promotional activities etc. Kellogg just like any business enterprise wanted to gain maximum profit with minimum investments they do.
It was not until 2013, they realized they were spending a lot of resources in upgradation and management of their own on premise infrastructure. Their technical architecture was already outdated and was hardly meeting the needs, their hardware was already aging, they also needed an upgradation in their SAP Application. But in today’s agile world and competitive market, to invest in on premises infrastructure is often considered as waste of resources, instead the resources can be utilized in a better way by investing more on trade spend which even generates better revenue.
They needed a new advanced and powerful infrastructure to work on which would decrease capital expenditures and also minimize disruption during future hardware upgrades, it was then when they decided to move to cloud.
Why AWS?
Kellogg’s was looking for a scalable and trusted cloud platform, which would fit in their budget.
In reviewing the new SAP landscape, Kellogg’s became interested in an SAP solution called Accelerated Trade Promotion Planning (TPM), powered by SAP HANA.
AWS offered a fully SAP-certified HANA environment on a public cloud platform and met all of Kellogg’s criteria.
But Life is Hard!
This task was way too complex than it seems. It included significant software changes, multiple outage points, along with global management & coordination to execute the cloud move. It was a risky task as it might have caused project overruns, technical failures , downtime and disruptions which was not an option for Kellogg’s. They wanted a safer migration to the new cloud architecture, dealing minimum manual work, project risk and downtime.
What’s the solution then ?
To overcome this challenge, AWS suggested Kellogg’s to engage SNP to assist with the SAP upgrade at the application layer.
The project began in October 2015. The SAP ERP system was migrated with SNP Transformation Backbone, enabling a near zero downtime approach. Using SNP’s automated on-premise solution, the migration of SAP ECC 5.0 on the AWS Cloud was executed simultaneously with the other SAP components in one project that included the EHP upgrades, the Unicode conversion, re-platforming to Linux with the latest version of the Oracle Database, and the data migration to the AWS Cloud.
Go-live for the migration took place during the weekend of March 7, 2016, with a total technical downtime of less than four hours. More than 1,600 users in five markets were migrated with near zero downtime and on an accelerated timeline.
What all AWS services are being used by Kellogg’s ?
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2):
EC2 Instances process more than around 50 TB ( old report ) of sales data weekly from promotions in the US, modeling dozens of data simulations a day.
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC):
It is connected directly to the Kellogg’s data centers to allow access to SAP TPM directly for employees who are on the company network.
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3):
It used for data backups, including HANA.
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) :
It is used to provision IOPS (P-IOPS) volumes for storage.
- AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM):
It is used for company logs events.
It is used for monitoring, which helps the company allocate costs to each department based on their individual infrastructure use.
Note:
For high availability, Kellogg leverages multiple AWS Availability Zones (AZs) without the additional cost of maintaining a separate datacenter.
Key Benefits:
- Easy upgradation without much manual work.
- Rapid migration and low risk
- Upgrade and migration of multiple SAP components simultaneously.
- Near zero downtime (less than four hours)
- Reducing Data Center Management expenses.
- Faster path to increased reliability, improved performance and faster replication of environments.
Thank you for your time, hope you liked it :)
