AWS Case Study: Junta de Andalucia

Mr. Carlos González Florido is the Chief Technology Officer of Iavante Foundation that is an organization fully owned by Junta de Andalucia that provides technological services to the Health Department. Mr. Gonzalez manages technology innovation projects, ranging from internal IT systems maintenance and evolution to new projects to provide Andalusia’s citizens with improved access to their health system.

When developing the Health Department’s Citizens Communication Public Web portal (Informarse), Mr. González Florido faced a problem common to IT departments in organizations of all sizes: the need for an infrastructure solution that would provide scalability and performance, especially in terms of bandwidth, with flexible server provisioning and low cost to fit the project’s budget allocation.

Mr. González Florido and his team turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS), building their solution on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). As he states, the Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 solutions “provide us this flexibility and a very good bandwidth within our budget.”

Now fully deployed, the Health Department’s application server portal is hosted on Amazon EC2 instances, with large amounts of data including high definition videos stored on Amazon S3. Mr. González Florido estimates his team’s infrastructure cost using AWS at 1/30 of what it would be with a regular infrastructure services provider.

For its development on AWS, the Health Department team used open source software tooling, including Eclipse as their IDE development tool and Nuxeo Collaborative Portal Server for portal and document management.

Praising the documentation and supporting materials provided by AWS and its developer ecosystem as “excellent”, Mr. González Florido has found that AWS’ ease of use and low cost of entry encourage his team to test and to validate their solutions before committing to design decisions. He adds, “With AWS we could focus on the development of the real value and content of the application,” while eliminating the need to “put effort on the infrastructure details.”

Based on its success with AWS to date, the Junta de Andalucía is analyzing additional opportunities to deploy projects and systems using AWS services. Mr. González Florido concludes, “AWS let us make real a project that otherwise would have been impossible because the high investment and technical complexity.”

To learn more, visit http://www.informarseessalud.org/ (in Spanish) .