Bedrock Real Property Services Migrate And Optimize Analytical Workloads In Just Five Days

Overview

Bedrock Real Property Services specializes in real estate services such as advisory services, brokerage services, valuation of real property, and providing litigation support with experience spanning two decades. The Dallas-Fort Worth metro area-based company offers its expertise to numerous government agencies, law firms, companies, lenders, and individuals. Bedrock Real Property Services provide their clients with a rock-solid foundation to support their informed decisions.

The Challenges

Bedrock Real Property Services is renowned for its excellent customer service, research capabilities, analytical skills, sound market analysis, integrity, and timeliness. The client maintains the highest ethical and professional standards set for by the Appraisal Foundation, Appraisal Institute and CCIM Institute. Furthermore, to ensure the highest standards and accuracy are maintained, the client leverages the latest technologies for their quantitative analysis for decision-making. For scientific evaluation responsibilities, the client had engaged with a services partner and developed an analytical application using R and Shiny Application, hosted in a docker container residing on an AWS EC2 instance. Shiny Applications provide an interactive web user interface for analytics powered by the powerful R package known as Shiny; the programming paradigm is reactive enabling the user with the ability to switch through datasets, which triggers automatic events to take necessary actions and generates insights instantaneously, for live analysis.

However, the company was unsatisfied with its experiences with Amazon Web Services and made the decision to migrate to Google Cloud Platform for better app modernization and cloud-native development. As a result, Bedrock Real Property Services partnered with D3V Technology Solutions to help optimize their application by reducing operational costs, improving security, and improving overall functionality.

Our Solution

We applied the best practices suggested by Google Cloud for migrating workloads to GCP. The key steps involved in the process namely: Assess, Plan, Deploy, and Optimize were carried out with attention to detail.

Step 1: Assess
A comprehensive brainstorming and discovery session allowed D3V’s certified cloud engineers to coordinate with the client and client’s previous technology partner to run through an inventory analysis of workloads that needed to be migrated to GCP such as application dependencies for Shiny app, list of workloads that needed to be migrated, whether the application needed external access requiring SSL or DNS update, etc.

Step 2: Plan
In the plan step, we set up a GCP account for the client with the appropriate organization structure, access privileges, and created environments on GCP that matched with the existing environments on AWS to attain similar or better application performance after migration.

Step 3: Deploy
We executed a lift and shift approach towards migrating Shiny Application workloads to Google Compute Engine, as there was no business need to change the application or add more functionality and control.

Step 4: Optimize
To optimize the application, we suggested that the client move the workload to a Container-Optimized OS VM known as COS VM on GCP as it was the best fit for this use case thanks to a lean, optimized, and security-hardened operating system built by Google. With this move, containers, automatic security patch updates are readily available and containerized applications can easily be deployed out of the box.

Constrained with time and budget, we were in search of an experienced technology partner who could navigate through the migration work quickly and effectively. With D3V Technology Solutions, a Google Cloud Partner, we found the right experts who exceeded our expectations and got the job done in no time.
-Dr. A. Ason Okoruwa (Bedrock Real Property Services Founder)

Key Accomplishments

Completed Migration in Just 5 Days
The entire process of migrating workloads (assessing, planning, deploying, and optimizing) from AWS to Google Cloud was completed and delivered within 5 days.

Reduced Operational Costs by 90%
Thanks to their expertise and deep knowledge of the Google Cloud Platform, D3V Tech, a Google Cloud Partner was able to reduce the operational costs by 90 percent.

Improved Security and Stability
Stability and security are often reasons for concern when choosing the “lift-and-shift” cloud migration strategy. However, our engineers took all the necessary steps during the planning phase to ensure stability of the application and chose container optimized OS VM on Google Cloud Platform to improve security.