leveraging the cloud to strengthen democracy: ndi case study - aws washington d.c. symposium 2014 -...

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

Leveraging the Cloud to Strengthen Democracy

Chris Spencecspence@ndi.org

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

Cloud and Democracy?

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

Journey to the Cloud1. Increasing challenges

1. Employee demand for more technology

2. Security issues

3. Competition

2. Opportunity to innovate in the field

3. Flat or decreasingtech budget

Building our server room in 2011 - before we started tearing it down in

2013

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

Cloud Strategy

v

SaaSAWS

On-Premise Private Cloud

Authentication, Logging,

HRMS, Reverse DR

VPC S3

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

Role of SaaS

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

DemTools as a Service

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

Program Sites, Apps

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

Example: Malawi

Malawi Election Monitoring Center, May 2014

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

AWS as Data Center - VPC

AWS

On-Premise Private Cloud

vAuthentication

Systems, Logging, HRMS

Reverse DR

VPC S3

• Virtual Private Cloud - single network

• Business apps in VPC, connect to on-premise services

• Example: DNS

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

Software Dev, DevOps• Cloning preconfigured server stacks snapshots• Easy backups, restores, snapshots Amazon Simple Storage

Service (S3).• Streamlined project

development• Lower project costs• Easy to set up

dev, staging, production

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

• Integrated On-Premise Infrastructure

• Backup/Recovery, DR• High Availability, Load Balancing

Additional Benefits

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

Improve Security

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

Suggested Best Practices

Get started, the benefits are significant and can be realized in the short term:

• Get the low-hanging fruit first• Migrate services to the cloud in line with lifecycle• Get to know Reserved Instances, appropriate sizing• Approach DevOps differently • Map out your security plan in advance • Document everything

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

Challenges• Training Technical Staff

– Professional development

• Managing Costs– Costs peaked at $11K/month,

now $3500

• Security Configuration– Hybrid environment– Coordinated security policies

between EC2 environment, onsite firewalls, servers

Monthly AWS Costs

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

The Numbers• September, 2011

• 85 physical servers, 7 racks in server room• 10 tons of AC cooling

• June, 2014• 12 physical servers, 53 EC2 instances, 30 VMware instances in private

cloud on premise, 2 server racks• Reduced server room size by 50%• 5 tons of AC cooling

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

Wins for Democracy• Focus resources

• Reduce costs, complexity

• Increase impact of programs

• Drive democratic innovation

Cambodia: Presidential Candidate Debates

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

Chris Spence, CTO

@cspence

cspence@ndi.org

Tech4Democracy Programs

Blog: http://demworks.org

@NDItech http://ndi.org

@NDI

Contact Us!

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

About NDI

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium Washington, DC | June 24, 2014 - June 26, 2014

Thank YouChris Spence

cspence@ndi.org