Globe realized massive cost savings and performance improvements by shifting workloads from proprietary databases to PostgreSQL on Amazon EC2. Encouraged by such results, Globe moved even faster, migrating their telco-grade workload in seven months, with no interruptions to service quality. The initial 10% reduction of this footprint netted a 4x performance boost, and cut license and support fees by $1 million. At the outset, Globe freed up 20 processors and 40 cores that previously ran a particularly expensive proprietary database in both production and development environments. But moving their management application from proprietary databases to open source PostgreSQL running on Amazon EC2 was much faster. Globe chose to pace their modernization efforts with a phased approach.
Today, the company runs over 3,000 Amazon EC2 instances and more than 8 petabytes of storage, and is quickly approaching Cu’s goal to be cloud-first. The result? Provisioning time, which once took months, now takes hours. In 2019 the company focused on completing migration of their legacy systems and the rearchitecture of critical applications to be cloud native. A year later in 2016, Globe dropped provisioning time to two days, and had shifted 90% of their new infrastructure to the cloud.
One year into their modernization initiative, Globe had migrated 50% of their infrastructure for this application to AWS, reducing provisioning time from 80 days to five days. Globe quickly reaped the benefits of modernization. The company is “doing as much as we can to get out of proprietary databases,” Sy-Manalang noted, and embracing lower-cost, higher-value open source innovation running on AWS.
The cloud model, while a significant enabler of Globe’s innovation, was made complete for Globe with the addition of open source infrastructure. While the company can’t yet move all applications to the cloud, according to Sy-Manalang, “We need to deliver scalable and reliable platforms, and increase agility while keeping our costs down.” According to Cu, AWS stepped in early on to provide training, thereby preparing Globe to think strategically about their cloud adoption. Cu wanted to focus on optimizing for development costs without incurring unnecessary “throwaway costs” associated with over-provisioning of on-premises hardware.” Doing so would put Globe in a position to more flexibly scale to meet customer needs.Īt that time, 90% of Globe’s enterprise systems used Oracle databases. This policy aimed to shift Globe’s IT spend from a CapEx model, which is dependent on constant server acquisition, to an OpEx model, which is easily scalable. “You have to set an aggressive top-down goal that forces the organization to move faster than it organically otherwise would.”įor Globe, that mandate came in 2014, when Cu declared a cloud-first policy with a goal to put most of its IT systems on the cloud. AWS CEO, Andy Jassy, said at AWS re:Invent 2019: “Most of the big initial challenges of making a transformation to the cloud are not technical.” Instead, they’re a function of leadership. Bogged down in proprietary databasesĬorporate transformation often needs an executive mandate. Let’s look at how Globe managed their modernization efforts, and achieved their infrastructure and business goals. We needed to move faster and scale faster.”Īs Globe has modernized with open source solutions on AWS, by moving applications from on-premises, proprietary infrastructure to open source databases running on AWS, the company “is seeing better performance at 1/10 the cost,” according to Sy-Manalang. In embracing the cloud, said Globe’s CIO, Pebbles Sy-Manalang in an interview, the company has particularly sought ways to use more open source “to free ourselves from vendor lock-in. Globe Telecom (“Globe”), a major telecommunications (“telco”) services provider in the Philippines, is no different, and has embraced AWS to increase the company’s pace of innovation, allowing them to actively experiment with different applications designed to improve the lives of Filipinos, according to Globe CEO Ernest Cu. A swelling number of organizations are turning to open source, and running it in the cloud, to modernize their infrastructure.