Solution components:

• Amazon EC2
• Amazon RDS – MySQL
• Amazon S3
• CloudWatch
• AWS config
• CloudFront

The project

Create an on-premises data center or move your entire system to the cloud? That was the dilemma for the Peruvian agency dedicated to monitoring glaciers and high mountain lakes. Here is a summary of how we helped to implement the best solution, optimizing costs and remarkably efficient performance in data management when your collaborators started working from home.

Challenges

Climate change has had a major impact on glaciers and mountain ecosystems that cover almost 50 percent of Peru.

This environmental challenge, combined with the actions the government took after the devastating Ancash earthquake and landslide in 1970, prompted the creation in 2015 of the National Institute for Glacier and Mountain Ecosystem Research (INAIGEM).

The agency has grown rapidly since then, monitoring the country’s high-mountain glaciers and lakes and setting up early warning systems for landslides. The agency also investigates the resources of mountain ecosystems that are used by local populations.

There is an ongoing push across government towards digitization and zero paper usage to streamline operations. In high school they needed to decide between building an on-premises data center for their growing data management needs or moving their entire system to the cloud. Decision-making accelerated during the spring of 2020, when the lockdown due to the start of the pandemic forced all INAIGEM employees to work from home. Previous data management problems were compounded by increased online communication.

The Solution

At Itera we help INAIGEM to initially implement the AWS solution after deciding the service provider. The institute uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to run its applications and relies on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store and help safeguard its growing data resources. Plus, it takes advantage of Amazon Cloud Front for highly secure content delivery and AWS CloudFormation to quickly provision resources.

Similarly, INAIGEM takes advantage of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). “For the database, we are working with Amazon’s native RDS with Amazon Aurora to be able to scale the database independently,” explains Axel Echevarría Piérola, INAIGEM solutions architect. “And when there’s no activity, like at night, the database automatically shuts down and we save the institution money.”

To handle the high demand, the institute relies on AWS Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing for autoscaling.

Benefits

The institute’s cloud solution was up and running in record time, just under six weeks after first posing the challenge.

As the first Peruvian government agency to make use of cloud technology, INAIGEM has become more agile and fast in terms of internal and external communication and, consequently, in decision-making. All this simultaneously with savings of 80 percent on items that are no longer necessary, such as couriers, office supplies and printers.

The success of the implementation of the AWS solution in the IT era has caused other agencies to show interest in migrating to the cloud as well.