Critical Public Health Application Moved to the Cloud to Track COVID Immunization Records and Eliminate Crashes

Georgia Registry of Immunization Transaction Services (GRITS) Supports COVID Data Management

 

The Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) has utilized a long-standing on-premise, shared datacenter for its applications and IT infrastructure that required the agency to commit to servers and services to meet anticipated demands without having the ability to scale based on actual utilization. This practice meant DPH had to commit to server configurations based on predicted peak loads, resulting in budget infrastructure costs based on expectations instead of actual utilization. In addition, infrastructure utilization expectations were established before the onset of the COVID pandemic. At the onset of the pandemic, Georgia Registry of Immunization Transaction Services (GRITS), had its focus expanded to support COVID data which was collected and managed in the system. DPH experienced several instances during the pandemic of the system crashing due to the large amount of data being processed relative to the fixed infrastructure capacity, which negatively impacted the system’s reporting capabilities and public-facing dashboards.

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Technologies Involved

AWS

AWS ACM and KMS
AMS Advanced
AWS EC2
AWS Elastic Load Balancer
AWS MGN
AWS Migration
AWS RDS for Oracle
AWS S3
AWS WAF

AWS Migration Services Competency

Solution Objectives

Adjustable infrastructure resources as demand on the system increased or decreased – providing the added benefit of reduced technology costs by moving away from fixed assets.

Faster response times for new infrastructure requests, incidents, and resolutions.

Robust business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities over the legacy on-premise environments.

Solution Provided

TekStream worked with the Georgia DPH and its application vendor to review the GRITS application’s infrastructure, security and operational requirements to devise a migration plan allowing DPH to safely and efficiently move the GRITS platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Working with DPH’s IT staff and the application vendor’s developers, the GRITS application was moved into AWS. This move allowed for right-sizing the support
architecture for standard operational requirements while taking advantage of AWS cloud services such as Application Load Balancers and Auto Scaling to support increased demand on an as-needed basis. This also allowed GTA to only pay for the capacity they need at any given time without having to pay for peak capacity perpetually.

  • TekStream’s focus was working with AMS Advanced to clone copies of existing Web and App servers with AWS Migration service (MGN) and working through the AMS Advanced WIGS ingestion process. Also, TekStream DBAs worked with DPH DBAs to migrate on-premise data to AWS Oracle RDS.
  • After the high-level design, priorities were identified as speed and cost as the most important.
  • With the MGN migration, the vendor application team was able to do minimal modifications to a familiar JBOSS application and web tier environment.
  • The AMS Advanced WIGS ingestion process was automated to prep the machines to be AMS Advanced hardened and certified so for max security and for patching automation. AMI’s were created from an intermediary tools account and shared along with EBS volumes to application
  • accounts where they were launched alongside VPC and other infrastructure components using CloudFormation.
  • TekStream initiated the project with Quickstream and engaged DPH and application vendor team resources to analyze existing pain points and opportunities for modernization. A review of the 6 R’s of Cloud migration strategies were discussed and compared to customer priorities.

“TekStream helped us secure more than $50,000 in funding for our project as part of the AWS Migration Acceleration Program. Rapid movement to the cloud was the only possible option for the public health emergency response and it continues to serve us well.”

– Technology Lead, Georgia DPH

Key Successes

As a result of migrating the GRITS Application services to AWS, Georgia DPH was able to decommission their existing on-premise environment while gaining the ability to auto-scale workloads as needs change while reducing infrastructure cost accordingly. In addition, DPH was able to take advantage of the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) to offset implementation fees. AWS MAP allotted a savings of 30% (more than $50,000) of the implementation costs to DPH for the GRITS project.

Other benefits of the migration and modernization to AWS include:

  • Created a more highly available and resilient infrastructure for the workloads
  • Replaced existing Web Infrastructure tier with AWS CloudFront/WAF with Elastic Load Balancing providing more performant and secure access to
  • the GRITS applications
  • Provided a more efficient and sustainable backup and recovery strategy for GRITS databases and application servers AWS to cover the pilot costs

Customer: Georgia Department of Public Health

Industry: State Government Agency

Headquarters: Atlanta, GA

Annual Budget: $269.8 Million

The Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) has utilized a long-standing on-premise, shared datacenter for its applications and IT infrastructure that required the agency to commit to servers and services to meet anticipated demands without having the ability to scale based on actual utilization.