In the early 2010s, GE Oil & Gas, a multinational conglomerate General Electric division, was facing a pressing issue.
The company was spending a significant amount of its budget on maintaining its IT infrastructure, and the spending was trending upwards. Their current setup needed to be more scalable and adaptable to the fast-paced energy industry’s needs.
It was clear that something had to change.
After careful deliberation, the GE Oil & Gas team decided in 2014 to embark on a massive cloud migration project. They partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of its robust capabilities and reputation in the industry.
The project was ambitious: move over 500 applications to the AWS cloud over the next three years. The company’s leadership knew the process would be challenging, but they believed in the potential long-term benefits.
“GE is turning into the first digital industrial organization in the world,” Ben Wilson, chief IT officer at the time for GE Oil & Gas said. “We have to tag, measure, monitor, and automate every application and start to create patterns that make those reusable. Without that, we would never be successful.”
A dedicated team was established to oversee the project to ensure a smooth transition. The team worked meticulously, moving one application at a time to avoid unnecessary downtime and to ensure each application worked as expected in the cloud environment.
As the migration proceeded, the team was thrilled that their goals were coming to fruition. When the migration began in 2014, after a year, they had moved 128 applications to the cloud. By the end of Q2 of 2016, that number was up to 350.
The most intriguing application they moved to AWS was Epsilon, which had 750TB of data they regularly analyzed. The execution of this relied on using the AWS snow family to transfer that enormous data payload into the cloud.
The first 50 TB of data moved into the cloud used AWS snowball and only took two weeks. However, they estimated it would have taken them around 100 days to transfer that data over the internet manually.
The scalability and flexibility of AWS allowed GE Oil & Gas to only pay for the computing power they used, significantly reducing costs. Additionally, they found that their IT team was spending less time maintaining servers and could focus more on innovation and improving business operations.
By the end of the three-year migration period, GE Oil & Gas had successfully moved all their targeted applications to AWS. As a result, the company reduced its TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) by 52%. The success of this project showcased the power and efficiency of cloud computing, helping to drive similar initiatives throughout the broader GE organization and the oil and gas industry.
“This move to AWS wasn’t just about cutting costs,” Wilson noted towards the project’s end. “Where we saw the greatest benefit is when we started using tools inside of AWS that made a difference.”
Using a combination of Aurora as a metered database and leveraged data from Trusted Advisor and CloudWatch, they could get in-depth metrics on how their applications were being used. During periods of low usage at night, they could shut down resources and bring them back up when needed with things like Elastic Beanstalk.
“We’re moving all of our apps into the cloud.”, Wilson said. “We’re also looking to move all of our engineering apps into the cloud as well. We want to provide a differentiated user experience for engineers.”.
A genuinely incredible transformation and adoption of cloud technologies that provides a great example of how enterprise-level companies can leverage cloud computing.
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