Leading provider of distributed generation storage and energy services out of California, developed a unique and industry-leading solar sales platform for channel partners, resulting in optimized sales cycles and increased market share. The platform was built on Salesforce Heroku, which has proven to be costly, minimally-configurable, and non-standard vs modern cloud providers. They sought a new standard for our customer-facing platforms with better flexibility, better security, better scalability, and lower operating costs. Biarca chose to containerize the application and transport from Salesforce Heroku to GKE on GCP. With this move came additional benefits, including run-time security, fully-managed databases, scalability, high availability, highly configurable monitoring & log aggregation, all at reduced OPEX.

The Challenge

Leading provider of distributed generation storage and energy services, had the following requirements for migrating its on-premise applications to the cloud:

1. Re-architect existing stack, mapping to Google Cloud managed services where possible or to compute/GKE equivalents
2. Create a detailed architecture design with the highest security
3. Bring up the entire stack on Google Cloud Platform
4. Perform functional and performance tests
5. Test functionalities and features

Customized Solution from Biarca
After careful study of the client’s application migration requirements, the Biarca team architected a solution involving the following components:

1. The database migration turned out to be far more challenging than moving applications to Kubernetes. We had Postgres databases to move, with several hundred gigabytes of data. The normal way to migrate Postgres databases of that size with minimal downtime is:
   1. Make an external replica using streaming replication or similar
   2. Wait for the replica to catch up to the master database
   3. Promote the replica to be the new master
2. Moving applications to GKE was a complicated project with many moving parts, but there were three main tasks we needed to accomplish:
   1. Setting up Kubernetes clusters
   2. Porting application to Kubernetes
   3. Migrating Postgres databases from Heroku Postgres to Google Cloud SQL

Customer Value Proposition
The solution that Biarca designed for migrating the client’s existing infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform had the following benefits:

1. Standardized Cloud environment
2. Better flexibility, better security, better scalability and lower operating costs
3. Run-time security, fully-managed databases, scalability, high availability, highly configurable monitoring & log aggregation, all at reduced OPEX