The migration to AWS cloud infrastructure
Challenge
Accelerate cloud ambitions.
In the data-driven world we live in today, capturing and leveraging data to strengthen decision-making and business processes, is essential. Heineken naturally seeks to harness the full power of its data in a smart, efficient way. Therefore, Xccelerated had been asked to partner with Heineken Global’s Advanced Analytics team to accelerate their cloud ambitions. A cloud environment for smart processing and storing of the company’s data that improves user experiences for the company’s data scientists, end users and stakeholders. The cloud data platform had to be a space where tools could be developed, tested, and where machine-learning models could be deployed. The platform had to take into consideration the many sources of data across Heineken’s numerous different platforms and countries. A further complicating factor was security, since most of Heineken’s data is very sensitive.
Solution
Building efficient architecture for handling big data
We trained Heineken’s security and network team members on cloud infrastructure and how to build efficient architecture for handling big data. A multidisciplinary team had been formed to build the infrastructure using Amazon Web Services (AWS). The AWS environment contains multiple services for online development such as Jupyterhub, Visual Studio code, and Apache Spark.
Result
Incredibly versatile boasting many capabilities.
Since most of the tools and data are located in the cloud, data scientists can analyze data and develop models in the cloud environment without needing to store the data locally. As a result, they can share their work effortlessly and securely. By the end of the bootcamp, the cloud environment turned out to be incredibly versatile boasting many capabilities—the environment can be easily managed and new features added. Afterwards, in collaboration with Heineken’s security and network teams, we successfully built an improved cloud infrastructure based on infrastructure-as-code to future-proof the data capabilities of Heineken, globally.
According to a Heineken team member: "We have been able to use the environment to support more than twenty projects, fifteen countries, and multiple business units. This flexibility saves us a lot of money, time and energy. Given our experience with Xccelerated on this project, it’s undeniable their cloud engineers should be part of any data team."
