AWS Application Migration for Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)

The Solution

The DWP team utilised the G-Cloud Government Framework to procure services to support the project which commenced with a migration Proof-of-Concept. This exercise is routinely provided by Devoteam to assist customers commence their Cloud migration journey, focused on moving one (1) application environment to AWS. The platform then underwent a Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) as an input to ‘drive-out’ the tasks that would eventually lead to a fully functional production instance of the target application.

The migration project had three high level requirements:

• Application Migration -> The migration of eight (8) internal and public facing applications from an existing private Cloud environment to AWS;
• DevOps Approach -> Infrastructure-as-code by default;
• On-boarding -> A migration and partner approach that enabled knowledge transfer to the DWP through a combination of cross team working, and AWS training.

The Retirement & Bereavement Team migration project commenced with the deployment of a range of components that would be common to all applications, including secure networking, code control, deployment pipeline and authentication. These supporting technologies along with a baseline VPC design, established working practices and the set-up of a joint Devoteam and DWP DevOps team formed the Migration Factory.

The applications migrated to AWS as part of the project were:

• Check Your State Pension;
• Bereavement Support Payment;
• Find Your State Pension;
• Get Your State Pension;
• Job Seekers Benefit Enhancement Service;
• Pension Deferral Lump Sum Calculator;
• Record of Call.

Each application was then adapted and scripted for deployment to AWS

Making use of AWS services where appropriate. Services used beyond EC2 included Lambda, RDS and Amazon Elasticsearch. Code promotion pipelines were created using Jenkins and S3; Jenkins pipelines were also utilised to automate the creation of custom AMIs.

The applications were migrated sequentially over an 8-month timeline, during which each environment was iterated upon to increase automation of several functions across the deployment.

During the migration, Devoteam and AWS assisted DWP personnel with knowledge transfer activities ranging from generic technical essentials training to more specific DevOps consulting. Over the course of the year, DWP were able to scale down their requirement for Devoteam assistance as they onboarded knowledge internally.

The Benefits

• As a PDU it now has a platform from which it can not only support its existing services but also expand to enable new developments for its users.
• It has gone from a single datacentre with manual configuration to multi AZ redundancy coupled with full infrastructure as code for its entire platform.
• Multiple reusable components such as ECS services, WAFs, MongoDB clusters that allow new projects to quickly leverage infrastructure options as part of its designs with the knowledge they have already been through IT Health Checks.
• It has extended iteration from beyond the application codebase to the infrastructure as well with many two-week sprints applying significant updates to the architecture.
• Proven reproducibility of deployments through destroying dev, test and staging environments every evening.
• Migration away from a fixed architecture to a dynamic with auto-scaling to give services an ability to flex according to demand.
• Knowledge transfer of AWS/Terraform development techniques to enable the DevOps team to deliver a successful migration of multiple applications.
• Ultimately it can now adapt its infrastructure as needs change over time in conjunction with Product Ownership and Delivery.