Cloud Ecosystem Newsletter
Welcome to the Cloud Ecosystem Quarterly Newsletter. Each quarter we will provide a combination of initiative highlights, performance against key metrics, and our latest releases and accomplishments.
Past Cloud Ecosystem Newsletters
Cloud Advisory FY2024 Q1 Metrics
The following graphics illustrate Cloud Advisory key metrics over the past quarter by service and organization, as well as by cloud ecosystem producer-type projects (Infrastructure) and consumer-type projects (Application).
Of note, we promoted four projects to production and improved our help desk efficiency addressing ~1,800 tickets. We are constantly working to improve, so stay tuned for more.
News
Netscaler Removal
The Cloud Network Product Team has completed a major milestone in the removal of NetScaler within the FCS system. EBTA, CaaS, and most of MCaaS systems have replaced NetScaler with new services that will increase the stability, reliability, and security of the platform as well as significantly reducing O&M costs.
Modernization Agreement
In an effort to enhance knowledge sharing and mutual expectations regarding the Ecosystem - Tenant partnership, a Modernization Agreement (MA) Overview has been developed and added to the FAS IT Playbook. The MA is a document that outlines the relationship between the Service Producer (the Ecosystem) and the Service Consumer (the Tenant). It specifies which Ecosystem products and services a Tenant will consume, the scope or size of the work involved, and the costs to the Tenant over the fiscal year. MAs communicate the terms of mutually accepted expectations and agreement.
Release Notes
Update to the CaaS Start/Stop Login Environment On-Demand Capability
CaaS implemented a new start/stop login environment as an on-demand capability in FY23 Quarter 4. This creates cost savings for tenants by giving them the ability to stop and start environments on demand or on an automated schedule. In FY24 Quarter 1, this enhanced capability was rolled out to additional environments broadening accessibility to current and future tenants.
Completed ElasticSearch to OpenSearch for IAE
CaaS team completed the migration of IAE’s ElasticSearch version 6.x to OpenSearch 2.x. This is part of the effort to modernize IAE’s infrastructure.
Migration from Jenkins IAM User to Jenkins Role
Through the results of a Root Cause Analysis brought on by an increase in the number of reported Jenkins build failures, the EBTA team identified that the failures were resulting from credentials issues including:
- Static credentials which required manual rotations
- Credential expirations which required manually tracking and updating
- Credentials residing in multiple locations, making it difficult to track and keep up to date
To resolve this, EBTA developed a solution to migrate away from using AWS IAM users in EBTA Freedom Jenkins to instead use specific IAM Roles within Jenkins. The various pipelines were updated to assume roles/cross-account roles with migrated permissions rather than IAM users. AWS auto key rotations were leading to unexpected outages because Jenkins credentials were referencing specific users. By instead using IAM roles, manual work is longer needed for managing credentials in Jenkins which has increased stability and improved user experience. This solution is now active in Dev, Test, and Prod environments for all EBTA Jenkins tenants.
NEW Data Dog Weekly Office Hours
The MCaaS team has facilitated a partnership with Datadog to host weekly office hours that are open to all tenants that consume Data Dog. This is a highly valuable customer experience improvement that enables direct tenant to vendor contact providing tenants a higher level of support and a faster means of solving their business problems.
Workspaces
Since officially launching the Workspaces Shared Service offering in early October of 2023 and onboarding several more tenants, the team has removed Endgame with Elastic Agent installed into production in order to remain compliant with FCS/GSA standards. The team continues to iterate improved environments for tenants dependent upon their specific needs and requirements.
Data Catalog Standardization
A joint effort between the Chief Data Officer team and FCS professional services has resulted in an updated Alation data catalog. This new catalog captures meaningful attributes for all GSA organizations beyond FAS, including OCFO, PBS, OGP and others. In addition to the Alation updates, supporting documents including FAS metadata template and data steward guide have also been updated for data catalog users.
Data Migration from Oracle to Postgres Database
FCS Data Professional Services team worked with a tenant to migrate from Oracle to Postgres Database. This change should allow the tenant to save infrastructure/license cost on their database, no longer operate on security exceptions by fulfilling the GSA mandate on data encryption, and also resolve the SWAP usage issue that the tenant was previously experiencing. The experience and knowledge gained through this improvement can be leveraged and applied to other tenants.