Rocket Business Connect (RBC) Transitions to AWS

Rocket Software’s MultiValue (MV) data servers are designed for agility, scaling with your business needs while providing robust, resilient infrastructure, including running in the cloud. Many of our customers and partners have already moved their business critical MV applications to the cloud. Now, Rocket Software has moved our own UniData-based app, Rocket Business Connect (RBC) to AWS. Not familiar with RBC? Learn more from this blog post.

Why move RBC to the cloud?

To further improve our disaster recovery plan, the Rocket team decided to transition RBC to AWS. While we’ve always harnessed the power of replication, and relied on a publisher and subscriber, being in the AWS cloud gives us the ability to automatically fail over within a region. We can also manually failover across regions with only minor configuration changes.

According to Todd Elliott, Rocket Software Director, Business Applications, “Even in the cloud, using replication is critical to our disaster recovery plan.”

Best practices

The project of moving to AWS - from the initial meeting, planning, upgrading, migrating, testing, and going live – was three months with RBC down on a Saturday morning for only four hours. The Rocket team responsible for the migration shares some best practices they followed:

• Don’t be afraid to hire a consultant to architect and build the environment.
• You need to know your architecture, including everything your app communicates with.
• Appoint one owner who’s in charge of working with IT.
• Upgrade your MV data server, associated MV tools, and operating systems and then test before you move to the cloud.
• Consider using internal staff to configure servers.
• Rocket Customer Solution Engineering (aka professional services) also offers a paid engagement to help with moving MV data server to new hardware with the same or a different operating system, including transfers to a virtual environment or cloud service (OS update included if needed). Look at the MV Rehosting Package.
• Rely on a strong project management office (PMO) leader to keep the project on track.
• Involve people outside the app including your security team, devops team, network operation team and other specialists.
• Put security at the top of the list. It’s important to be very deliberate and plan, in advance, for network ports that need to be open to the AWS data center. The default has every port closed and you need to determine points of integration and ports that must be open.
• Test some more, as it’s a super important part of the plan. Don’t forget to ask your end users to participate.

Benefits of running RBC in the Cloud

One of the notable benefits of moving to AWS is the performance improvement. RBC is used daily by both Rocket team members and our customers and partners.

What’s next for RBC?

Elliott continues, “While we’ve been focused on modernizing the backend of RBC, during our next modernization project, we’ll focus on updating the front end.”