George Qiao Shares a Day in the Life of an Engineer at Logicworks

“The skills and experience you get working for a massive enterprise are invaluable,” says George Qiao, who leads Logicworks’ Oracle Database practice, “but there’s nothing like the energy of the SMBs and startups that we support and help to succeed!” 

At Logicworks, we aim to bring enterprise skills and resources to cloud-based FinTech and HealthTech companies. By outsourcing some of these specialized engineering tasks, customers can benefit from top-level talent without having to invest the time, budget, and resources to recruit and retain specialized top talent. In fields like networking, security, and database architecture, where highly skilled experts are widely sought-after, this can result in big savings and a major competitive advantage. 

“When our customers have a problem in a critical area of their infrastructure like networking or database architecture, and it’s impacting their users, they need access to a top-level expert,” said Steve Zeller, Logicworks VP of Product Marketing. “We bring the kind of expertise you’d find at a Fortune 500 corporation and make it available to companies that would otherwise find it prohibitively expensive and difficult to access independently.” 

That’s where George comes in. With a 25 year resumé at industry giants like Salesforce and Verizon, he has architected some of the largest Oracle databases in the world. Now he’s bringing those skills to bear for Logicworks customers, large and small. Here are a few customer success examples:

FinTech SaaS Platform Oracle Database Migration to AWS

A current global leader in high-quality integrated payment solutions came to Logicworks to migrate their Oracle Database from an on-premises datacenter to the AWS cloud. This customer sought out the Logicworks database team to maximize the efficiency of their migration while maintaining zero downtime and also meeting PCI compliance standards. The project included the development of an AWS staging environment, replication of data across sites, testing, and production cut-over.  

Statewide Health & Human Services AWS Migration

One of the largest projects in Logicworks portfolio this year is a statewide Health & Human Services organization’s migration to AWS. The project encompasses dozens of state agencies including Veteran Care, Elder Care, Low-Income Family Care, Disease Control, Prescription Drug Programs, and Mental Health. Logicworks is in the middle of an end-to-end migration process including strategy & advisement, solution architecture, migration, testing, and go-live. And when the migration is complete, it will transition to ongoing managed services and security with 24×7 support. 

“One of the unique things we can do in the cloud is to mix legacy technology with cloud-native platforms and services,” says George. “In this case there was a high degree of dependency on an older version of Oracle Database, and re-coding the dozens of applications to work with Oracle 19c was not easy, but we still wanted to leverage the increased speed and flexibility of AWS.” 

George architected a new solution. The Logicworks team used floating IP addresses to connect with Oracle, and set up a serverless AWS Lambda function for app fast failover. Oracle Data Guard was used to replicate between Amazon EC2 instances. This allowed us to reduce our Recovery Point Objective (RPO) from four hours to thirty minutes and achieve a zero-downtime migration to the cloud.”

George also automated the pipeline for new Oracle resources deployment with silent configuration process and an Amazon Machine Image library. “At the end of the day,” explains George, “we were able to use cloud technology to turn a legacy Oracle installation into an immutable infrastructure pipeline.” 

Point-of-Sale SaaS Platform for Restaurants 

During the Covid pandemic, every restaurant in the country needed to develop an online ordering and payment system. One of Logicworks’ customers was an integrated online and point-of-sale SaaS platform specifically designed for restaurant and hospitality companies. In order to scale to meet the massive demand, they decided to migrate to AWS and re-platform their database. 

“One thing that AWS has gotten extremely good at is automating the database migration and management process,” explains George. “Using a combination of AWS DMS and Amazon RDS, we were able to migrate and simultaneously re-platform onto a rapidly scalable platform.”

AWS Data Migration Service was used to replicate data from the on-premises Oracle cluster to AWS. An Amazon RDS environment was architected to receive the data. The rest of the applications were ported over, everything was tested, and the customer was able to go-live. Amazon RDS is a managed platform, so once it was in production, management tasks like backups, scale-up / scale-down, database monitoring, and security could be managed programmatically. This was especially helpful since PCI compliance was important for the Point-of-Sale and ecommerce capabilities for the customer. 

Looking Ahead

“After spending years at a time developing for a single enterprise, the ability to move from project to project and greet new challenges is really fun,” says George. “As we continue to expand the database consultancy and help more and more clients to be successful and grow, it’s very personally fulfilling.” Over the next months and years, Logicworks will continue to recruit top-level talent like George, and expand the practice deeper into areas like data science, AI/ML, and analytics.

Written by George Qiao
Senior Cloud Database Architect at Logicworks