Australia Post signed, sealed and delivered to Amazon cloud by AWS partner Fabric Group

Australia Post has connected the country with letters, parcels and deliveries for more than 200 years. To connect to the public cloud, it turned to Melbourne IT provider Fabric Group.

Fabric had been managing the core freight and logistics application for Australia Post and its parcel delivery business StarTrack for more than six years, including hardware and network in a traditional data centre.

These applications are critical to AusPost's freight business, used by more than 50,000 customers.

The time had come to renew the physical infrastructure, and AusPost was ready to move away from traditional on-premises hardware and consolidate its data centre footprint on Amazon Web Services.

Angus Bissland, head of commercial services at Australia Post, said: "Fabric made the decision to move to AWS easy. The approach to the PoC was lightweight and quickly validated our critical systems could run in AWS. Fabric’s iterative approach gave us continuous visibility and confidence that we would meet our deadline to decommission our legacy hardware and maintain service levels of our critical freight lodgement systems."

Key to the client's requirements were minimising risk and reducing cost with a pay-as-you-go model. Fabric's six-month project ticked the box saving AusPost from spending up to $500,000 on hardware and helping the company exit its data centre.

To validate that AusPost's applications could run on the Amazon cloud, Fabric leant on a bevy of AWS technologies to build a proof-of-concept: EC2, S3, ELB, CloudWatch, CloudWatch Logs, Autoscaling, CloudFormation, CodeDeploy, CodeCommit, Elasticsearch, Kinesis Streams and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM).

After a successful PoC, production applications were migrated outside of business hours and with no business impact. Legacy on-premises infrastructure was shut down and decommissioned three months after the transition.

Fabric Group is a finalist in the Modernising Infrastructure (Enterprise) category at the 2017 CRN Impact Awards. Follow this link for the full list of finalists. The winners will be announced at the Impact Awards dinner during the CRN Pipeline conference in Sydney on Thursday 6 April.

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