National Broadband Ireland Brings High-Speed Internet to 1.1 Million People Using AWS

NBI launched in November 2019, when the Irish government awarded the NBP contract to NBI’s lead backer, Granahan McCourt, worldwide investors in technology, media, and telecommunications. Growing from an initial bid team of under 50 personnel, NBI quickly scaled its operations to approximately 2,000 people working to deliver on the key milestones included in the contract.

To keep up with this speed and scale, NBI required a solution that would be resilient and reliable as the organization and the network grew. The organization chose a cloud-native approach to avoid the time and expense of building an on-premises infrastructure. NBI collaborated with PFH Technology Group, an AWS Partner, to prepare its proposal, and, after winning the bid, used PFH’s AWS expertise to launch a cloud-native solution quickly and efficiently.

Rolling out broadband connectivity to more than 1.1 million people across 569,000 premises meant NBI needed to build a network spanning 96 percent of the country. Working on such a high-profile project at this scale meant there was no room for error. “Scale and resilience were critical factors when taking decisions about how to build out NBI’s infrastructure,” says Peter Hendrick, chief executive officer (CEO) of National Broadband Ireland. “That’s why over two-thirds of our operating platform is built using AWS microservices. It helps us scale up and down by component, rather than by application.”

With PFH taking care of the technical aspects of building the platform, NBI could focus on the business process to deliver Ireland’s National Broadband Plan. NBI had to meet tight deadlines and performance targets, and PFH’s cloud knowledge and enterprise experience supported the organization’s ability to launch at speed.

By building on AWS, NBI avoided a long process of sizing, ordering, provisioning, and maintaining physical hardware. The organization was also able to create its platform in a much shorter time compared to using on-premises equipment. To achieve the reliability needed for this infrastructure, NBI uses AWS Regions and Availability Zones (AZs) to provide backup and fault tolerance. An AZ is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity within an AWS Region. This rapid development of resilient infrastructure meant that NBI met the government-mandated service level agreements (SLAs) of 99.95 percent for response time and availability, and they did it in a cost-efficient manner.

To reduce operational overheads, NBI uses Amazon API Gateway—which can create, maintain, and secure APIs at any scale—to host internet-facing APIs at scale. It also uses AWS Fargate, which provides serverless compute for containers, to handle API requests. The process is orchestrated by Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications. Amazon Aurora, designed for high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility, provides database storage for NBI’s system.

NBI also relies on AWS to deliver services to internal users. It hosts applications, such as GE Smallworld’s proprietary database and SAP HANA for enterprise resource planning (ERP), using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running a mix of Windows and Linux operating systems. Amazon EC2 provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. And NBI’s telecommunications network design teams get consistent, powerful, pre-provisioned environments that can be accessed from anywhere through Amazon WorkSpaces, a managed, secure desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solution.

NBI’s platform is designed to deliver the highest levels of security and compliance. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) allows users to secure and monitor connections, screen traffic, and restrict instance access inside their virtual networks to logically isolate different workloads. AWS Control Tower, which can help set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment, is used to manage AWS accounts.

NBI continuously monitors workloads for malicious activity using Amazon GuardDuty, which protects AWS accounts with intelligent threat detection. AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) protects web applications from common exploits and defends external APIs.

NBI uses AWS to gain greater visibility into its telecommunications platform to meet the contractual requirements and reporting obligations of the NBP, including service levels, coverage, and uptime. It centrally collates logs and metrics, using Amazon CloudWatch, which lets users observe and monitor resources and applications on AWS, on premises, and on other clouds. With the help of PFH, NBI created processes using Amazon CloudWatch and other tools to quickly and accurately report performance to the Irish government. The reports also help NBI to rapidly identify and fix any issues that arise, to incorporate lessons learned into future operations and, where possible, automate the process.

The organization also tracks changes using AWS Config—which can assess, audit, and evaluate configurations of resources—and AWS CloudTrail, which can track user activity and API use, to provide a record of all actions taken by AWS account users.