Vida Homeloans were looking to migrate from a data centre to Azure. Performance testing the new environment gave solid proof of the operational improvements and cost efficiency that was going to be achieved.
Performance testing for cloud migration is the best way to ensure operational improvements and cost efficiency for the application that’s being migrated.
The Challenge
Vida Homeloans are a specialist lender for customers who fall outside the criteria of mainstream lenders. With a proposition that’s criteria driven, it’s imperative that the mortgage application system performs highly to achieve the level of service they pride themselves on for intermediaries and customers, over the entire mortgage journey.
Vida had made the decision to move away from data centre hosting and over to a cloud-based solution. The team felt that there were performance improvements that could be made and moving to a new environment could potentially be the opportunity to achieve those improvements. With the current data centre contract coming to an end, it was the perfect opportunity to embrace cloud adoption and migrate over to Microsoft Cloud Azure.
Changing the data environment successfully relied heavily on delivery deadlines being met and achieving a seamless transition for rehosting. Instigating a hosting move was a challenging prospect as outages needed to be avoided at all costs. Any delays or disruptions would have major cost implications and would negatively impact on the service that intermediaries and customers received.
Vida needed assurances before they undertook the cloud migration project that performance would improve with Azure and that the new environment would definitely be better than their current hosting environment.
To achieve the guarantees they required, they turned to Synetec to conduct extensive performance testing before implementing the migration over to Azure. Testing needed to provide evidence that rehosting in a new environment would indeed improve the current situation and that a cloud-based solution could adequately support the required number of users without any detrimental impact on performance.
The Business-Changing Solution
Initially Synetec applied industry standard, world class testing using JMeter which is able to conduct extensive performance and load tests. Through this phase, we tested capacity to see how many total users could be supported in comparison to the current hosting environment. It was important for us to understand how far the system could be relied upon in terms of peak usage, so we also conducted detailed load testing, operating at 70% peak user levels.
Conducting this kind of stress testing provided concrete, factual data about when potential upgrades with cloud capacity would be needed in the future to maintain performance levels and reliability.
Through the process, we created a testing tool which was a set of artificial user journeys similar to real life ones. The user journeys were run in the old and new environments so that the results could be compared, and the Azure environment adjusted where needed. The benefit of doing this was that these user journeys are now a reusable business asset that can be used by Vida for benchmarking in the future.
The Results
With Synetec's extensive knowledge and expertise in performance testing, the project was delivered in only 6 weeks. As a result, Vida are able to confidently move over to Azure with the factual evidence that it could cope with their user numbers and live up to their performance requirements.
By conducting detailed testing, not only do they have a better environment and improved performance, but they have also been able to realise cost benefits as they are only paying for the exact level of resources that were shown to be needed in testing. The customer journeys we created as a testing tool have provided a reusable asset that protects against business continuity issues. Any updates in the future can be rolled out with confidence.
Vida’s users are now receiving a better experience with no delays and an improved journey. With ambitious business targets for the future, the company can confidently work towards those goals without technology performance concerns as they are clear on the capabilities of the solution.
By taking the risk out of changing the environment, Vida have been able to protect their end-users through effective and vigorous testing. Whether you’re migrating software that’s bespoke to you, or software that is a ready-made, off-the-shelf product, performance testing is a vital step in the cloud migration journey.
We now know exactly what we will see on Azure in terms of performance improvement and cost reduction, which is critical before making the move. Synetec also provided us with a testing tool we can keep using before rolling out any updates, ensuring continuity. David Flashman, Head of IT, Vida Homeloans
