Tamimi Markets is one of Saudi Arabia’s fastest-growing grocery chains, and Saudi shoppers have awarded the company a Top 100 Saudi Brand five times in the last six years. Our goal is to be the best supermarket in the kingdom, focusing on customer service, quality, freshness, variety, and reasonable prices every day.
For many Saudis and expatriates, Tamimi Markets is their preferred supermarket. Our spacious, well-stocked, and affordably priced supermarkets stock the best local and regional brands, as well as a diverse assortment of excellent vegetables, meats, fish, cheeses, and home items.
Tamimi Markets is a Saudi Arabian corporation with headquarters in Al Khobar and is a subsidiary of the Tamimi Group, which is located in Dammam. We presently have over 20 supermarkets in Saudi Arabia, including Al Hasa, Al Khobar, Aqrabiyah, Dammam, Doha, Jeddah, Jubail, and Riyadh, with plans to more than double our store count by 2020.
Tamimi Markets encountered the following challenges which inclined them to evaluate and leverage public cloud platforms:
1.With rapidly growing business in the KSA Region, Tamimi Markets data center was unable to keep up with the pace. It was getting expensive to scale, with a large upfront capital required for scaling the data center and time consumed in placing the orders for the hardware and its delivery.
2.Customer needed to save the upfront capital to be invested scaling up the existing on-premise data center.
3.Customer used various reports on a daily, weekly and monthly basis which took a while to be generated in their existing SAP systems.
4.Customer needed a scaled up and flexible infrastructure for their existing SAP environment without any time delay and with a quicker go to market strategy.
5.Last challenge for Tamimi Markets was that this deployment of their IT Ecosystem on cloud was the very first experience for them, which had to be allayed by seamless delivery and swift migration from on premise to AWS.
Tamimi Markets Infrastructure is running on AWS Cloud, where various AWS services have been deployed with respect to the customer Requirement such as CloudTrail, CloudWatch, IAM in order to protect data, restrict Access, monitoring of security related activities and generate automated responses.
Tamimi used AWS CloudTrail in order to enable Governance, Auditing and compliance monitoring. CloudTrail helped Tamimi to record each API activity and made sure that every API is written to a log. Similarly, AWS CloudWatch was implemented for monitoring the resources which are being used and maintaining them accordingly. It helped them in collecting logs and metrics data. Also, AWS IAM enabled the customer to securely control access to the AWS resources which have been deployed, this service helped them to manage number of users and creating groups to manage different kind of users.
Each EC2 instance has an attached Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume, a high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 for both throughput and transaction intensive workloads at any scale. This pairing of EC2 instances and EBS Volumes resides safely in the AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The VPC then provisions a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where the resources were launched in a defined virtual network. The VPC was divided into a public subnet and three private subnets, where each private subnet was host to its own inter-related suite of applications.
Tamimi Markets also used other services of AWS like CloudTrail which enables governance, compliance, operational auditing and risk auditing along with a service for monitoring and observability named Amazon CloudWatch. Finally, AWS Systems Manager was setup for Tamimi Markets for visibility and control of infrastructure on AWS. AWS Systems Manager also provided a unified user interface so that Tamimi Markets’s personnel can view operational data from multiple AWS services thereby allowing them to automate operational tasks across varied AWS resources.
Tamimi Markets infrastructure contained a dedicated VPC on AWS Cloud
- A Multi AZ approach is utilized for HA
- Private subnets are provisioned to isolate workloads.
- CloudTrail is deployed to record events occurring on AWS account
- AWS Managed Backup is configured to ensure business continuity
- AWS marketplace based SDWAN solution is used to extend on-premise network to cloud
- CloudWatch is configured to monitor the servers
- Alarms are configured to trigger SNS email topics
- IAM roles have been configured for teams, departments, and individuals.
- AWS Marketplace Solution has been configured for security as well the S3 for application backups.
Step 1: Meeting with Stakeholders
Citrus scheduled a readiness assessment meeting with key stakeholders including the Security Team, Network Team, Infra Lead, Application Lead, Operation Lead, and Business Unit Head to discuss the goals for migrating applications to AWS. The team discussed short-term and long-term objectives, risks, and issues related to IT and business application migrations.
Step 2: Analysis of Results
After cross-presentation with the customer, the Citrus team analyzed the results and built an out-brief pitch that contained summary observations and next steps to fill the identified gaps. This was required to build a statement of work for closing the identified gaps and completing the suggested next plan of action.
Step 3: Review of Current AWS Footprint
Citrus reviewed the client’s current AWS footprint, applications, operational processes, and integration. The team had discussions on various topics related to the migration process, including business, governance, people, platform, operations, and security.
The assessment also involved resource discovery using Live Optics tool for collecting and analyzing the data in the client’s IT environment. The tool was used to identify areas where the entire system could operate more efficiently at a potentially lower cost.
Step 4: Migration Process
Citrus presented the customer with a high-level AWS migration plan that included project preparation, project governance, project kick-off, landscape setup, server deployment, AWS readiness, sandbox environment on AWS, and setting up development/production environments. Re-hosting candidates (APP Servers) were migrated using AWSCloudEndure, while Re-Platform was done for the Hana DB servers using Backup and Restore.
To ensure a smooth migration, Citrus executed a mock data transfer by moving data backup file from on-premises to AWS Cloud. This allowed the team to estimate the time required for data transfer. A sandbox system was created as a pilot environment, and a mock migration was undertaken before the real production migration. Data points acquired from the pilot, such as data transfer issues, restoration challenges, time length, and data corruption challenges, were used to plan for the final production switch over.