Leidos improves a U.S. government agency's IT position with migration to AWS Cloud

The Leidos Team worked with a U.S. Government Agency to migrate their public-facing web applications from a managed hosting environment to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. As a result of Leidos' efforts, the agency now enjoys both significant cost reductions and performance improvements.

Customer Challenge

Before the migration, the agency suffered from the inherent limitations of on-premise IT environments.

• Increased network traffic resulted in the agency purchasing and installing additional hardware
• Expensive hardware sat idle without constantly high traffic
• Unused capacity and costs for full development and test environments made the financial need for change very apparent
• Manual installation of new hardware to keep up with network traffic led to slow reaction times and often performance bottleneck problems resulting in a poor user experience when they could not access the website

Recognizing the technology issues, end-user frustration, and financial drain, the agency came to Leidos to solve their challenges.

Leidos Cloud Migration

The Leidos Team successfully moved and optimized the web applications to AWS, enabling the applications to work more effectively in the new environment. Leidos initially proposed a three-phase approach that implemented a gradual change from traditional on-premises architecture to a highly dynamic and fully automated application workflow using AWS' managed services.

• The first phase created a cloud environment intended to closely mirror the on-premise setup.
• The second phase introduced AWS-provided services to reduce costs.
• The third phase brought in more managed platforms to reduce or eliminate overhead.

The agency recognized Leidos' expertise and agreed the third phase target was the correct way forward and preferred to jump straight into the phase 3 target environment. Following the agency's request, the Leidos Team migrated the web applications to AWS through a re-platforming effort, utilizing AWS managed services to gain the cloud's cost and flexibility benefits.

The Leidos AWS Approach

The applications were migrated and integrated with a series of AWS managed services. The application itself runs on Apache HTTP Server instances managed by Elastic Beanstalk. Elastic Beanstalk provisions an auto-scaling group and an Application Load Balancer (ALB) with a built-in Web Application Firewall. The Elastic Beanstalk Application also uses and manages a pre-provisioned RDS instanced (migrated from MySQL) as its data store. The ALB is the only public ingress point for the agency's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network. There is also development and test VPCs provisioned, similar to the Production VPC, but without the public ingress. Instead, developers access those via the Management VPC for unit tests, load balancing, etc. The S3 endpoint in the management stack allows developers to upload application installs for Elastic Beanstalk to S3 for automated deployment.

Customer Benefits

With Leidos proven expertise on the benefits of moving from on-premise to a cloud-services based architecture, the agency is now reaping the rewards that come with migration to the AWS cloud. Since cloud capacity scales with network traffic, the cost of website hosting shrunk by an astounding 75% versus when they hosted on-premise. In addition, the previous issues – such as performance bottlenecks for servers and databases – have been minimized due to the scalability and responsiveness of the AWS services.

Even the most technically competent customers may overlook the fact that simply moving an existing application to a statically allocated cloud environment does not provide the expected cost savings. Migrated applications must be fully integrated with the services of a Cloud Service Provider like AWS to fully realize the cost and performance benefits that come from the cloud.

For more information on Leidos' AWS cloud solutions, please visit leidos.com/cloud or contact us at [email protected].