OneMagnify migrates from on-premises to Google Cloud to future-proof their business and support customers

The sleet and snow have created near-whiteout conditions as you slowly pull your kneeling van into the parking lot of the motor lodge. Fortunately, your spouse is sound asleep in their wheelchair from the long, exhausting trip and didn’t have to experience the sudden onslaught of wild winter weather. Carefully, you remove the wheelchair from its position where the passenger seat would be and move it to the lift so you can lower your spouse and push them to the lobby to check in. You only hope there’s room at the inn and that a snowplow comes in the morning to clear the road so you can be on your way again.

None of the above would be realistic without the support of an enterprising automaker, their entrepreneurial dealer network, and a state-of-the-art marketing and sales order system. Commercial-grade vehicles like a heavy-duty van with special options, including wheelchair lifts, and otherwise standard box trucks with road maintenance add-ons, such as snow plow blades, can only be supported with custom applications from a specialist technology firm. OneMagnify is one such tech company, and it also happens to be an award-winning creative agency and marketing analytics and technology consultancy.

“OneMagnify helps our large automotive customer work with their dealers that sell commercial vehicles, which means there’s lots of retrofits, upgrades, and big vehicles involved,” says Kerry Schaffer, Senior Director of Information Technology at OneMagnify. “That includes anything from mobility updates for people with disabilities to campers. They cover everything across the board and in between–even snow removal equipment.”

Business challenge

For OneMagnify, supporting Fortune 500 customers’ outsourced marketing analytics programs is a key part of how they help build and transform their brands. The company began by delivering those services from on-premises data centers in Detroit and other cities in North America. As their customers increased their international presence, OneMagnify knew they needed to expand their marketing analytics applications globally to places where they didn’t have data centers.

“We want our customers’ highly scalable marketing campaigns, which we enable, to reach anybody wherever they are in the world,” says Schaffer. “We’re starting to open offices globally. We have offices in Germany and India, and we’re opening an office in Singapore. Basically, we didn’t want to build on-prem data centers in all those locations.”

With their largest customer expanding internationally, it was important for OneMagnify to be everywhere they wanted to be. That meant moving to the cloud, which they know is where the information technology market would go over the long term. OneMagnify wanted to avoid errors in their move to the cloud and desired a working relationship with a solution provider who could guide them as they migrated applications as well as deliver training to support their transition. 

Solution

OneMagnify set out to find the solution provider that could match their geographic and cloud computing needs. They considered AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Google Cloud, with infrastructure services available in locations across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, met the needs of OneMagnify. 

“We evaluated the offerings of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud and looked at how they actually compared to the work that we wanted to do in the cloud,” says Schaffer. “Google Cloud was a good fit for us. Also, we knew that Google Cloud was the best choice based on all the regions where it’s available and where we have and plan to have offices. Another good reason we chose Google Cloud is because our biggest customer signed a commitment with Google Cloud.” 

Set up a Minimum Viable Cloud to ease migration to Google Cloud

To help the migration process, OneMagnify decided to work with SADA, a multiple-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year, who would set about building a deployment-ready landing zone in Google Cloud. As part of setting up the Cloud Foundations landing zone for OneMagnify, SADA set out to implement a Minimum Viable Cloud that would include configurations for:

• Resource Management 
• Identity & Access Management (IAM) 
• Networking 
• Billing Management
• Logging and Monitoring 

Once we met with SADA and they walked us through the use case to help us implement our Cloud Foundations, a big consideration was getting it right the first time. We didn’t want to make mistakes while we’re trying to quickly move to Google Cloud.

Kerry Schaffer | Senior Director of Information Technology at OneMagnify

After building out the Cloud Foundations space, OneMagnify now has all the necessary resources to implement its next stage of operations. “The fact that OneMagnify is starting to do more work globally and because it’s easier to provide scalable solutions in Google Cloud than on-premises were the biggest drivers for us,” says Schaffer. “The ability to easily deploy applications on Google Cloud was also a significant factor for the move.”

Use Cloud Run to minimize operational management issues

With their apps written in line with the 12-factor microservices methodology, OneMagnify developed them to be easily portable to various platforms such as on-premises or in the cloud. They were also able to make their applications run more efficiently in Google Cloud. 

“We wanted to deploy in a microservices architecture in a way that was quick and easy for the OneMagnify operations team,” says Derric Moses, Director of Information Technology at OneMagnify. “So we architected a solution using Cloud Run because it’s serverless and it doesn’t pose many operational headaches versus running Kubernetes and having to manage that platform.”

Additionally, with the ease of use of Cloud Build and Cloud Deploy for CI/CD, all OneMagnify had to do was make a few changes, and their applications were ready to port to Google Cloud. “We just had to figure out how to format and connect to the database instance in Google Cloud versus how we were doing it on-prem,” says Moses. “It was mostly about environmental factors that we had to adjust to.”

Impact

Migration-ready landing zone set up in only seven weeks

As a result of working with SADA, OneMagnify was able to complete their Cloud Foundations in Google Cloud in only seven weeks. With their Google Cloud landing zone functional, they were able to begin the process of migrating applications and workloads. To enable them to make changes as needed, SADA used Terraform to deploy Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to give OneMagnify maximum flexibility in configuring the landing zone for migrating applications. 

“We could easily spin up projects in Google Cloud on our own and make them work,” says Moses. “But are they secure and reliable? The way in which SADA set up our Cloud Foundations, everything was in Infrastructure as Code. All changes are tracked and controlled in the source code. Doing that work now sets us up for success later on.” 

Infrastructure as Code facilitates migration of workloads

Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates for deployment of key infrastructure elements including IAM, Project Organization, and Networking simplified and facilitated the migration of OneMagnify’s applications. SADA Cloud Infrastructure Engineers also provided “over the shoulder” training and knowledge transfer for OneMagnify to set up the infrastructure on their own with final documentation and IaC source code used to deploy and configure all Google Cloud resources.

It was helpful to receive an overview of the Cloud Foundations with SADA’s Cloud Engineers and walk through everything step by step. For example, they showed me how to use a VPC and subnet architecture in line with what I wanted to do. Then I implemented it. The process was ‘learn then do.’ We built the whole foundation component by component until we started to deploy applications at the end.

Derric Moses | Director of Information Technology at OneMagnify

Overall, SADA helped OneMagnify:

• Set up an application-ready Google Cloud landing zone in less than seven weeks
• Facilitate the ongoing migration of apps and workloads
• Simplify configuration of Google Cloud components with Infrastructure as Code
• Learn the ins and outs of their Google Cloud infrastructure with step-by-step training