The project
GRUPO ZOOM is a family-owned company founded in 1976 with the sole goal of connecting Venezuela to the world through parcel and document delivery. Guided by this goal, in just one year it opened its first Miami office to expand its portfolio into one of the world's strongest markets with one of the highest shipping volumes. From that point on, its corporate strategy has consolidated several business lines, including BUZOOM virtual mailboxes in 1984, MEGAZOOM international magazine subscriptions in 1991, and the ZOOM currency exchange in 2001, among many others, creating a dynamic business with a significant regional footprint. Today, Grupo Zoom, one of the region's business leaders in courier services and low-value transactions, wants to maintain this technology-driven strength, which has enabled it to endure since its beginnings and continue growing to deliver better customer service, says Carlos Atencio, the company's Vice President.
Challenge
As part of the digital transformation the company is pursuing to address new market challenges, Grupo Zoom aims to modernize its existing data center infrastructure. This will enable greater agility in implementing and adopting new processes while applying the know-how that has positioned it as a regional leader. To achieve this, the company sees public cloud technology as the option best suited to its needs.
This process presents major challenges that must be considered to implement the solution successfully. First, the company's legacy systems represent one of the most critical processes because they are the core of the business. For a successful migration, their components must be updated so they can run on the new operating systems. Meeting this challenge therefore requires tools that make the migration as seamless as possible, drawing on the expertise of specialists who define the scope of the cloud platforms. Another challenge involves databases that must deliver superior performance, since this low-value transaction network stores 3 million records per day from financial transactions such as remittances and payments. Finally, the company's interconnectivity must meet high standards of stability and reliability because it connects around 10 business partners, including Western Unión.
Response
The solution defines two deployment zones in GCP: one implements the DMZ and the other a private network, so that communication with the servers in the DMZ goes directly through Google's Gateway. This makes it possible to use the capabilities of this Google component without deploying highly available firewall appliances. For communications with external partners, a highly available PFSense VPN concentrator appliance is deployed as the entry point to the private zone. The private zone will also have RFC 1918 access to the Compute Engine instances hosting the PostgreSQL 9.6 databases.
The implementation strategy proposes a DRP model using a script (Deployment Manager) to deploy infrastructure between us-east4 and us-east1, so that if either fails, the same DMZ model can continue to be used because PFSense is present in both regions (Master and Slave). HA was proposed for the database to cover regional failures.
Stackdriver is used to monitor the application and the operation of its different components, enabling faster troubleshooting in the event of an incident. The appropriate logging level and the Stackdriver modules to deploy on database servers and other systems were also defined to ensure the information needed to analyze any unusual event within the platform is available.
