When your customers bet their business on your software, the security, trust and resilience of the cloud platform on which it operates is paramount.
Accounting software specialist MYOB’s cloud based solution AccountRight Live operates out of Microsoft’s Azure cloud. When the opportunity arose to use the Australia-based Azure cloud and Microsoft’s latest technologies, MYOB understood the significant benefits that this could bring to its customers.
So, over 21 nights MYOB’s tech team, working in close collaboration with Microsoft’s product engineering team, consumed 472 cups of coffee, established 312 Elastic Pools on the Azure cloud, migrated around 120,000 customer databases from Singapore to Australia, and caused precisely zero minutes of client downtime. The migration significantly reduced the latency for MYOB customers, and delivered a 45 per cent improvement in data extraction speeds in the core of the system.
Adam Ferguson, General Manager Engineering and Experience for MYOB explains the company’s sustained success comes from a focus on continuous improvement. It wanted to increase the speed of the system, enhance the operational management of data files, and boost its ability to monitor, log and move databases around in order to optimise operations.
At the same time, migrating out of Microsoft’s Singapore based data centre and into the more recently opened Australian data centres would reduce latency, address any clients’ data sovereignty concerns, and also provide business continuity assurances; delivering the important trifecta of security, trust and resilience.
MYOB was also constantly mindful that as a SaaS provider it needed to carefully manage the cost-to-performance criteria.
The new solution provided a cost effective approach, delivered headroom for growth and improved performance for MYOB clients.
Alex Barreto, MYOB’s Development Manager, explains that the initial driver for the project was to migrate from Web SQL databases that Microsoft was retiring.
As a single tenant solution AccountRight required each customer to have their own database on the cloud. MYOB explored options including migrating customers to Azure’s S3, or to the then still-emerging Elastic Pools solution.
According to Ferguson; “It would have taken a lot more work for us to move to S3 but it also was a little bit of a gamble for us to put those plans on hold and wait for the Elastic Pool to get to general availability.”
By mid-2015 it was clear however that Elastic Pools best met MYOB’s needs thanks to the powerful management tools available, higher database transaction units (DTUs) and significantly greater overall density.
Barreto says that in early 2016 his team was collaborating with Microsoft to effect a transfer off the old Web SQL databases and across to the Elastic Pools. “This whole project was so successful because of the collaboration between MYOB and Microsoft way before we started the migration,” says Barreto.
Using a series of scripts and tools that were customised by Microsoft for the MYOB transition Barreto and his team prepared for the migration.
Determined that the migration would not impede its customers and maintain the trust and resilience they have come to expect, MYOB and Microsoft conducted extensive performance testing and analysis ahead of the migration to ensure that the new solution would perform with the very high density of databases per Pool that MYOB required.
Given MYOB’s scale it made sense to deploy the application across multiple Azure instances. By combining the migration to Elastic Pools with a move to Microsoft’s two Australian data centres it was able to do that, and inject additional resilience into the platform. Barreto says AccountRight was updated to be multi data centre aware, which allows the load to be spread across the Sydney and Melbourne data centres. This provides additional business continuity confidence that if one centre is affected MYOB processing can seamlessly switch to the other Microsoft data centre.
“Now our Elastic Pools are split between Melbourne and Sydney. Before the databases had to be in a single centre.” In terms of the mechanics Barreto explains that MYOB’s databases were migrated directly into pools in the Australian data centres.
The team also scripted disaster recovery deployment scripts to allow AccountRight to run in any data centre. As it migrated MYOB tested the DR plan by deploying half the Pools in Sydney and half in Melbourne.
Despite the significant overhaul and the performance improvements which are now flowing through to customers, Ferguson says; “In terms of the execution of this, it was seamless from a client’s point of view.
“It was incredibly well executed to the point that I don’t think any clients would have noticed or been aware that we had made such a significant change in the back end both from an underlying database infrastructure to the geographical location of the actual database.”
In terms of benefits, Ferguson explains that the client install of AccountRight means that overall performance is dependent on the client’s hardware and the quality of their internet connection, but the execution time in the application itself is now 45 per cent faster thanks to reduced latency achieved by moving out of the Singapore data centre and into the data centres in Australia.
Ferguson notes finally that the systems revamp; “Benefits the clients first and foremost in terms of better speed, better stability in the platform. Our clients have greater confidence in the overall solution – that’s first and foremost.”