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Technical Approach

Technical Approach

Based on the business requirements, TMSS elected to utilize GSA Cloud Services Immutable Compute Deployment Cloud Play to integrate with the GSA Cloud Services Cloud Ecosystem. Using the "out of the box" features provided through the Immutable Compute Deployment option, TMSS was able to select an appropriate, modern, technology stack and leveraged several cloud native technologies.

Technology Stack:

Cloud Native Technologies:

Benefits of Cloud Modernization

Operations:

In addition to the cost benefits of migrating and modernizing using Cloud infrastructure, there are many operational benefits that reduce risks and increase security, efficiency, and flexibility of the system. The GSA Cloud Services provides many operational efficiencies and capabilities that were not readily available using the prior mainframe-based technology stack. For example, it provided the TMSS 2.0 project team with the ability to deploy a stack and redeploy stacks on an as-needed basis to patch vulnerabilities discovered by the Netsparker tool and then to perform patching in an automated manner. It also allowed the team to conduct Certificate Management with ease. Most importantly, the operational benefit is mainly felt by the tenant, which was the TMSS 2.0 project team in this case, as their O&M responsibilities became minimal with the use of GSA Cloud Services Cloud. Currently, TMSS is leveraging the flexibility of the cloud environment to implement a Tableau server to analyze, report, and share data more effectively.

Shared Services:

A major benefit of using GSA Cloud Services is the inherent shared services model. With the GSA Cloud Services shared services model, infrastructure maintenance of the hosted applications are spread across all application systems residing in the GSA Cloud Services environment. This significantly reduced cost by spreading it across multiple applications and tenants. Activities that would require human intervention or supervision are now handled by automated processes, such as the Monthly AMI patching and release, Operating System, Middleware and Database vulnerability management. In addition, the GSA Cloud Services environment comes with access to a ready pool of experts. (This also spreads cost across multiple tenants.) GSA Cloud Services experts are ready to provide assistance with architecture, visioning, setting up the Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CD/CI) pipeline, setting up data visualization services as well as data warehousing in the FAS Data suite of services, capacity planning, and application security. The TMSS 2.0 system is included as a CAT subsystem residing within the Immutable Compute Deployment environment of GSA Cloud Services, which expedited the time required to achieve the Authority to Operate.

Cost:

The auto-provisioning capability allowed the program to deploy services by using pre-deļ¬ned procedures that were carried out automatically. GSA Cloud Services ensured a shorter time to achieve Authority to Operate (ATO) since the tenant inherited the majority of ATO control requirements and the application teams were only responsible for the application layer. GSA Cloud Services also gives the ability to scale up and down as traffic changes. This means the program pays only for usage while benefiting from the consistent infrastructure savings that GSA Cloud Services provides.

For further details on the project management process and lessons learned, visit the TMSS 2.0 Whitepaper in the Playbook's "Whitepapers" section.