Executive Summary 

Profeeds was founded in 2007 as a stock feed manufacturing plant, initially producing, 150MT of chicken feed per month for a few commercial poultry farmers. Fast-forward to 2023, they are Zimbabwe’s best integrated agri-business focusing on both income generating options and solutions to all aspects of stock feed farming practices. Profeeds have a nationwide retail network encompassing 52 stores which service small and medium scale farmers in addition to commercial farmer customers. Profeeds was looking for a solution that would help them reduce overhead costs of maintaining and operating persistent data centres. STC recommended that they embark on a cloud migration journey which would start with one windows production workload.

Challenge:

Reduce the cost of running Enterprise Workload whilst accelerating the product’s time to market

Profeeds was looking for a solution that would reduce the overhead costs of maintaining and operating persistent their data centres. Profeeds also wanted to accelerate their time-to-market in order to gain a competitive advantage. Profeeds was looking at redesigning its enterprise architecture on the newest and latest infrastructure to ensure increased agility and allowed scalability.

Why AWS and STC

 AWS is by a considerable margin the world’s most widely adopted cloud platform which provides businesses with a highly available, scalable, agile and low-cost infrastructure.  Profeeds wanted to leverage AWS’ flexible pricing model which would allow them to launch and run production, staging and testing environments quickly at a low cost.

Profeeds partnered with STC, an advanced AWS consulting partner with the required expertise to run and manage workloads in the cloud and thus allowing Profeeds to focus on its core business without having to worry about managing infrastructure.

The Solution

STC designed a 2-tier web architecture solution that separated the windows-based web application from the SQL database, making the entire solution highly resilient by removing a single point of failure. The windows application is set up behind an auto-scaling group that would increase and decrease resources based on demand.  The solution leverages AWS elastic compute instances for the frontend application eliminating the need to invest in hardware upfront, so you can develop and deploy applications faster.  AWS Relational Database service was used to easily set up, operate and scale the SQL database.

All the production services were tagged under a common resources group for ease of node management using the systems sessions manager. To meet the client’s Recovery Time and Point objectives, AWS Backup a fully managed backup service was implemented using resource groups to target all production services.

Benefits Summary

• The business can focus more efforts on product innovation
• Huge cost savings of at least 35% through partnering with a managed services provider
• Highly available systems with little to no downtime i.e. 99,99% uptime

The Results 

Teaming with STC, Profeeds now has a modern infrastructure with 99.99% uptime. Profeeds no longer has to worry about managing infrastructure and Microsoft licenses utilizing the various pricing models in AWS that allowed them to pay only for the resources they were consuming.  Running in the AWS cloud also increased scalability, improved agility, and helped map a path toward modernization that will position the company to be more innovative. In the AWS cloud, Profeeds managed to meet their time-to-market requirements by a considerable margin thus meeting their customers’ expectations way ahead of schedule. AWS Backup enabled Profeeds to meet backup retention period requirements of 3 months.