ITEC

Telangana State’s ITE&C Department Migrates 33 Districts’ Workloads to AWS, Achieving Virtually Zero Downtime

2022

The Department of Information Technology, Electronics, and Communications (ITE&C Dept.) of Telangana, India, found that its compute needs had outgrown its existing on-premises infrastructure. The ITE&C Dept. hosted the Telangana government’s file management system application, which all 33 government districts used for completing daily tasks, in an on-premises data center owned by the state. The department sought ways to turn its steep capital expenses into operating expenses and to improve its availability, scalability, and information security by migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
 
The ITE&C Dept. used the services of Dataevolve Solutions (Dataevolve), an AWS Partner, to migrate its file management system application to AWS. Since migrating, the ITE&C Dept. has reduced downtime, achieving virtually 100 percent availability across all districts, and it has reduced its compute costs by 30 percent.

Unlocking the Benefits of the Cloud by Migrating to AWS

The ITE&C Dept. uses IT to achieve effective, efficient governance and to promote economic and social development in the state of Telangana, which is home to nearly 40 million people. As part of a government-wide digital transformation strategy, the department wanted to shift its focus to innovation instead of managing its on-premises data center. By migrating to the cloud, the ITE&C Dept. would be better equipped to support growing traffic from Telangana’s government departments, save taxpayer money by using compute resources more efficiently, and help prevent downtime to the government’s file management system application. In addition, gaining more security features to protect government applications was an important prerogative for the department. “We knew it was time to move toward the latest emerging technologies, including the cloud,” says Srinivas Pendyala, director of e-government initiatives at the ITE&C Dept.

Alongside Dataevolve, the ITE&C Dept. created a proof of concept that would demonstrate the success of running its file management system application on AWS. Since many configurations were hardcoded into the ITE&C Dept.’s legacy application, fine-tuning the proof of concept took nearly 1 year. “With the help of Dataevolve and the AWS team, we were able to debug and reconfigure the application to run on the cloud,” says Madasu Kishore, consultant at the ITE&C Dept. “After we saw that we could achieve the security, scalability, and availability that we needed, we formalized our migration to AWS and decided to migrate our other applications as well.”

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We knew it was time to move toward the latest emerging technologies, including the cloud. With the help of Dataevolve and AWS, we were able to migrate successfully, without any downtime or loss of data

Mr Srinivas Pendyala
Director of E-Government Initiatives, ITE&C Dept, Govt of Telangana

Using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to Reduce Usage and Costs

The ITE&C Dept. started work on its proof of concept in June 2020, began incrementally migrating its 33 districts’ workloads to AWS in December 2021, and completed the migration in February 2022. In total, the department moved nearly 95 TB of data, 150 servers consuming about 7,000 GB of memory, and more than 600 CPUs. Its file management system application now runs entirely on AWS, and the ITE&C Dept. estimates that 3,000–5,000 people use the application regularly. “With the help of Dataevolve, we were able to migrate successfully, without any downtime or loss of data,” says Srinivas Pendyala.
 
To run its file management system application, the ITE&C Dept. uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a service that provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. By using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, which makes it simple to add or remove compute capacity to meet changes in demand, the ITE&C Dept. can scale quickly as traffic increases. The department also uses multiple Availability Zones, as well as Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), which automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets and virtual appliances in one or more Availability Zones. “Spinning up new Amazon EC2 instances is simple, and we can expand our resources in virtually no time,” says Srinivas Pendyala. When CPU reaches 70 percent, such as during the morning surge that occurs when employees start work, the ITE&C Dept. can now automatically scale to add a new server within 5 seconds. Conversely, when CPU drops to 50 percent for more than 10 minutes, the ITE&C Dept. can automatically scale down its environment to reduce usage and costs.
 
Protecting sensitive information and maintaining compliance were also top concerns for the Telangana government. To increase security, the ITE&C Dept. uses multiple AWS services. It uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)—which lets users define and launch AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network—to host its workloads, and it uses 4, a web application firewall. The ITE&C Dept. also uses Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), a serverless set-and-forget elastic file system, to store, back up, and encrypt its files at rest. “With about 95 TB of data, backing up our application files would have been a huge task for us, but with Amazon EFS, the process is automated,” says Srinivas Pendyala. Finally, the department uses Amazon CloudWatch, a monitoring and observability service, to achieve visibility into its AWS resources, applications, and services. The ITE&C Dept. now has a comprehensive disaster recovery process in place, along with a bird’s-eye view of its cloud environment—useful in the event of an audit.
 
By migrating to AWS, the ITE&C Dept. has achieved virtually 100 percent availability and has experienced zero downtime across all 33 government districts. This improvement, along with virtually eliminating many tasks related to managing infrastructure and the file management system application, has led to an increase in staff productivity. The department has also reduced the total cost of ownership for its infrastructure by migrating to AWS. And by using pay-as-you-go pricing for AWS services, the ITE&C Dept. has reduced its compute costs by about 33 percent.
 
“Working alongside the ITE&C Dept. to help it become future ready and able to visualize as well as actualize its journey to the cloud has been a satisfying and enriching partnership journey,” says Avinash Kommireddi, founder and CEO of Dataevolve.

Planning to Migrate More Applications

Now that it has achieved high availability, scalability, and security using AWS, the ITE&C Dept. plans to guide other government departments in migrating to the cloud—starting with sharing the cloud best practices that it learned during its own journey to AWS. The ITE&C Dept. is also looking into migrating other mission-critical applications to AWS with support from Dataevolve. “Our successful migration to AWS sets the tone for us to migrate our remaining, citizen-centric applications,” says Srinivas Pendyala. “We sincerely thank Dataevolve CEO Avinash Kommireddi and the Dataevolve team for the efforts incurred during the migration of all the districts’ workloads.”

Learn More

To learn more, visit https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/autoscaling/.

About Department of Information Technology, Electronics, and Communications

The Telangana State’s Department of Information Technology, Electronics, and Communications (ITE&C Dept.) promotes the use of IT for effective and efficient governance, sustainable economic development, and inclusive social development.

Benefits

  • Migrated 33 government districts’ workloads with virtually no downtime or data loss
  • Achieved virtually 100% availability
  • Reduced compute costs by 30%
  • Can automatically scale to add a new server within 5 seconds
  • Simplified infrastructure management
  • Improved security and visibility
  • Increased staff productivity

AWS Services Used

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, with over 500 instances and choice of the latest processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model to help you best match the needs of your workload.

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Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps you maintain application availability and allows you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances according to conditions you define.

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Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) automatically grows and shrinks as you add and remove files with no need for management or provisioning.

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Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) gives you full control over your virtual networking environment, including resource placement, connectivity, and security. Get started by setting up your VPC in the AWS service console.

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