AASA Moves to HUAWEI CLOUD for Increased Flexibility

"Through face-to-face trainings and workshops with Huawei Cloud South Africa team, we learned that Huawei Cloud is easy to use and can fully support our production environment right there" - Jaco van der Merwe, CTO of AASA

About AASA

The Automobile Association of South Africa (AASA) is a non-profit organization with about 5 million registered users and 700,000 paying subscribers. They provide road security, trailers, roadside assistance and a wide range of vehicle related services. They are well known in South Africa, where they work with transportation, logistics, road administration, police, and finance and insurance agencies.

Challenges

AASA initially used hosted infrastructure in a local data center. As their business expanded, the need for computing resources increased, and AASA faced scaling, availability, and cost challenges. Their IT department found that constantly expanding their infrastructure to support business growth was delivering diminishing returns on investment. AASA was unable to scale up efficiently and cost-effectively. Dealing with the scalability and availability challenges, as well providing security for node deployment, was putting an increasing operational and maintenance burden on AASA. AASA has multiple types of apps for their services, but most of their services are consumer facing. Generally, service volume peaks on holidays and weekends. During those peak hours, the website and app traffic was placing a heavy strain on their limited resources.

Pain Points

Unstable system

Self-built environments suffer from frequent power outages, affecting service continuity and resulting in complaint from end users.

Poor performance

With the traditional virtualization environment they were using, their CPU utilization was often not even 20%.

Expensive O&M

Purchasing devices from multiple venders and service outsourcers is complicated, resulting in delayed response times, overly expensive O&M.

Outdated architecture

With a traditional Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architecture, services are tightly coupled, and there is not enough flexibility.

Solution

Huawei Cloud team designed a dedicate cloud solution for AASA.

AASA chose HUAWEI CLOUD IaaS to manage its systems and applications, including compute, storage, database, and monitoring services. HUAWEI CLOUD IaaS is a managed service, which means AASA can run their workloads without having to maintain their own hypervisor and control planes. By using services across multiple HUAWEI CLOUD Availability Zones, they can enjoy on-demand, zero-downtime upgrades and know they will always be running the latest security patches.

Benefits

  •

    Flexibility: Since completing its migration, AASA has taken advantage of the flexible billing that HUAWEI CLOUD provides to keep costs down. AASA primarily used a monthly subscription package for ECS servers, but when more computing nodes are needed, HUAWEI CLOUD automatically engages pay-per-use instances to expand resources to meet growing business demands.

  •

    Simplicity: AASA's O&M was simplified, and the combination of HUAWEI CLOUD compute instances and optimized workload performance provides significant cost savings. Their TCO was reduced by at least 10% per year.

  •

    Ease of Use: Deploying applications on HUAWEI CLOUD is easy. There is no need to setup compute, storage, and network infrastructures. AASA enjoy hassle-free infrastructure and can easily scale up cloud resources whenever needed.