Alma Media's Oracle database migration to AWS

Alma Media is one of Finland’s biggest media companies, and around 80% of the Finnish population encounter Alma Media’s services every week, most prominent of those being, for example, Iltalehti and Kauppalehti online magazines.

“We started our cloud journey around 2010 already, with the first services that were migrated to cloud platforms being our digital consumer services”, the CTO of Almamedia Partners Oy, Antti Koivisto tells.

Alma Mediapartners Oy is the subsidiary of Alma Media focusing on Finnish online marketplaces.

Knowit has been Alma Media’s trusted partner throughout the years, and has helped with, for example, Alma Talent in migrating Kauppalehti to AWS environment, as well as provided monitoring and support services for the company’s AWS cloud operations.

"The most important reason for moving our applications and services from the on-premise to AWS cloud environment is the benefit and the flexibility we get from the cost-effective pricing of cloud capacity", Koivisto says.

Koivisto is responsible for the technical development of Alma Media’s real estate and other e-marketplace services, such as etuovi.com and vuokraovi.com, and has had a strategic eye, for example, on recent migration of KIVI system Oracle databases to AWS cloud.

KIVI is Alma Media’s online real estate agency system, which is used by numerous Finnish real estate companies.

“The flexible capacity and cost-effectiveness mean, for example, that at 8 pm, when there is the heaviest load on the servers running our real estate marketplace, there is an increased capacity to handle that load, but at night time, while there are not many users around, due to automation, only couple of servers are in use”, Koivisto describes.

“Also, with KIVI, the old on-premise infrastructure was quite aged, so there was a need to find a new solution”, he adds to the list of reasons to transfer the service infrastructure into the cloud.

In Alma’s migration project Knowit helped to migrate the application data from the On-Premise Oracle database to AWS database by transferring one application’s data at a time. The production database migration was carried out after all application tests had shown that the new cloud environment worked as expected.

“The collaboration between Alma Media and Knowit has been smooth – their experts were an organic part of our team during the whole of the KIVI migration process, and has helped with their expertise to make the migration of our services to AWS real”, Antti Koivisto describes.

Knowit provided Alma Media with two Oracle DBAs with AWS knowledge working hands-on with the KIVI migration project, and extended their team with added experts when needed.

“The migration was executed in close collaboration with people from Knowit and our side. We had one person working on planning and executing this project for a whole year, and around three people from the development team working past three months, when the migration was done”, Koivisto tells about the team.

“Knowit has worked on the database already for ten years, so they knew very well what was in there. Collaboration is based on the trust that they know the details and what should be done”, Koivisto adds.

The collaboration will continue in the future as well, as Knowit database experts will execute monthly analyses on the functioning of the database, that report all the events and things that need attention and action.

“Knowit also acts as a monitoring partner for many of our services running on AWS. They take care of the 24/7 monitoring and responding to error situations”

“The biggest value Alma Media gets from this collaboration lies in the knowledge that Knowit has. They have highly skilled experts who can solve problems and error situations, which ensures that our services are running for our customers 24/7, seamlessly and without interruptions”