The Challenge: The Federal Government’s Cloud First policy was created in 2010 at a time when cloud technology was still relatively new. Government agencies were provided broad authority to adopt cloud-based solutions without being given a formalized implementation plan or strategy.
The Solution: BAE Systems used Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its hosting cloud to assist U.S. Federal Government customers with application development, cloud migration, and testing with continuous integration/continuous delivery. Throughout the process, our DevOps team used AWS microservices like CloudWatch to monitor and log the migration workload. These services enabled our team to create new automated build scripts that further optimized the migration of our customers’ software and applications – reducing labor hours and saving money.
How We Succeeded with AWS: The project required us to move three types of applications for our customer with varying degrees of complexity. A majority of the migrated applications moved were originally developed in Java. Using version control, security best practices and automation, our DevOps team developed a SAFe 4.0 implementation strategy that drastically reduced our customer’s anticipated migration timeline from six months to just ten weeks. Our team also created detailed reference architectures to document each deployment. This documentation set a technical baseline for how to transfer the customer’s applications in the cloud. The same documentation is also used to train new engineers joining our AWS DevOps team. The best practices developed using AWS help us to provide continuous support to our customers and improve the reliability and speed in how we deliver solutions for our customers.
AWS Services Used in Solution: CloudTrail, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, STS, SNS, SQS, VPC, EBS, and S3
Third-party Applications Used in Solution: Node.js; Windows App Server