leveraging the cloud to strengthen democracy: a case study - aws washington d.c. symposium 2014
DESCRIPTION
This session will explore how the National Democratic Institute has shifted its entire IT infrastructure to the cloud. You will learn their strategies for data center migration and hear best practices and lessons learned as well as specific ROI details.TRANSCRIPT
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 [email protected]
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
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