Success story at Telefónica
We recently completed one of the largest migrations to the cloud ever carried out in Brazil, transferring the systems of the Terra Brasil and Terra México business lines, which were in an on-premises data centre, to the cloud.
Migrating services to the public cloud is a task that requires a lot of attention, planning and the participation of various people and teams. In this article, you will find some technical details and a little about our process and learnings during this project.
Initial scenario and migration strategies
The scope of the migration consisted of transferring to the cloud all the services and data that were distributed in approximately 850 virtual and physical machines in the on-premises data centre, totalling more than 1.1PB of data.
The cloud provider used in this migration was Microsoft Azure, which has a wide variety of services and has been part of our cloud strategy since 2021.
Before starting the migration, we created a landing zone to structure the governance of the resources. During the migration, some of the resources were moved following modernisation and replatforming strategies, while for others the lift and shift approach was used, each one adapted according to the specific need of each workload at that time.
Adoption of native services
One of the main advantages of migrating to the cloud is the possibility of adopting native services, which offer greater[DG2] stability and simplify management by operations teams.
During this process, we replaced services previously run on virtual machines with native technologies, such as Azure Cache for Redis, Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Web PubSub. In addition, we implemented native network services, such as App Gateway and Azure Firewall, to control and balance traffic.
In the context of data, we migrated databases to Azure Database for PostgreSQL. We also migrated Oracle databases to the Oracle for Azure service, enabling a multi-cloud data storage solution. We also implemented NetApp Files for NFS and SMB storage.
In addition to the aforementioned changes, we adopted the lift and shift approach to migrate the other services that were in VMs, using Azure Migrate. We also made use of Azure VMware Solution (AVS) for the VMs that required few changes. With AVS, we managed to migrate approximately 400 VMs in just 6 months, ensuring agile migrations without the need for major adaptations in applications, tools or processes.
However, not everything was so easy and fast. It took a lot of discussion and planning to carry out the entire migration and adapt all the layers, from the computing part to other more complex layers, such as networks and storage, which required several[DG4] adjustments and adaptations to comply with security regulations and business needs.
A crucial aspect for the success of the process was the combination and variation of cloud migration strategies according to the needs and particularities of each workload.
Benefits of cloud migration
A cloud migration as robust as this one reflects countless technical and business benefits. These include improved operational efficiency, ease of workload management and increased governance and security due to the structuring of the landing zone, which serves as a basis and standardisation for the environment.
In addition, the benefits of having structured governance in the migration also contributed to the implementation of FinOps practices, resulting in cost optimisation and more effective financial control throughout the migration process and subsequent operation in the cloud.
Our plans for the future include continuing to invest in improvements and optimisations, contributing even more to the modernisation and evolution of the business.
Finally, this project was certainly a great challenge for everyone involved, as adopting the cloud goes far beyond simply using a new technology, as it entails a cultural and paradigm shift.
Therefore, congratulations to the entire Telefónica Brazil, Terra Brazil, Terra Mexico and Microsoft team for the partnership and courage to move forward with this change. Let’s continue innovating together!
