August 1, 2022 — In September 2020, Credence was awarded an unrestricted contract with the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) under DLA J6 Enterprise Technology Services (JETS) contract vehicle, to migrate, modernize and manage the Defense Automated Addressing System (DAAS) and its suite of applications to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud. DAAS is the largest electronic business hub in the Department of Defense (DoD) and processes over 5 billion transactions each year. DAAS has global importance, it supports military preparedness and materials management for the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Defense Agencies, NATO, and other U.S. allies. DAAS has been in production for nearly 30 years and Credence has plans to completely transform the infrastructure supporting DAAS using AWS GovCloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. Credence will drastically improve the performance of the DAAS for users worldwide while simultaneously increasing system security and reducing costs by provisioning precise resources that DAAS needs. Credence is managing the DAAS environments in AWS GovCloud on behalf of DLA and works closely with all the DLA partners to ensure operational success. Credence is a leading provider of cloud managed services for the DoD, having migrated and supporting mission-essential and mission critical DoD applications. As of this writing, many components of DAAS have been migrated to AWS GovCloud and are successfully running production and all lower environments in AWS GovCloud.
Problem Solution/Definition:
DLA hosted DAAS suite of applications in DLA managed data centers in Dayton and Tracy and had issues monitoring resource utilization, virtual machine provisioning, and meeting the needs of Agile software development teams including issues with application uptime and costs.
Proposed Solution & Architecture:
Applications from the DLA Data Centers to the AWS GovCloud utilizing a multiple availability zone architecture to provide redundancy and failover leveraging multi-AZ RDS Oracle databases and blue-green deployment architecture.
Outcomes of Projects & Success Metrics:
Migration of DAAS applications to AWS has achieved DLA’s plan to shut down the DLA datacenters to reduce operational costs. Operation is the AWS GovCloud is providing more responsive application experience for the end users and has brought down total cost of ownership of the DAAS suite of applications.
Describe TCO Analysis Performed:
The to-be architecture (EC2 & RDS instances) was analyzed and projected based on what was provisioned in the DLA Data Centers. Databases were consolidated to 5 shared database instances. Archive data was migrated from DLA and stored in the AWS Glacier and the minimum number of EC2 instances were provisioned to meet the customer’s needs.
Lessons Learned:
The DAAS Migration implemented a hybrid operational model, joining the DLA and AWS networks into one network while applications, users and databases were migrated. a network delay between DLA applications accessing the databases is AWS did show some latency, however the latency was manageable for the short term. The customers needed to be involved in every step of the migration process to ensure complete agreement and buy-in. In the future DLA can adopt this hybrid mechanism of operations to migrate mission critical applications.