Client: Wellington City Council
As part of a broader “Smart Council” programme, Wellington City Council (WCC) has been steadily modernising and implementing greater resilience into its IT systems. As part of this work, WCC has now migrated its entire data centre-based IT infrastructure into the AWS Cloud (Amazon Web Services). This migration includes critical council applications such as the Pathway rates system, parking, consenting, asset and contractor management, which use database server or Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology.
Wellington City Council officials asked Lynker Analytics to migrate their existing Sybase and SQL Server database infrastructure and their ArcGIS GIS technology stack from existing environments to equivalent EC2 servers in the AWS cloud. This was part of a major transformation to re-platform the entire IT infrastructure to AWS in order to reduce IT operational costs and increase infrastructure flexibility. The Lynker Analytics team worked in close partnership with WCC experts, Consegna and AWS.
A pragmatic approach to the migration was needed to balance architectural improvements and application upgrades with a risk-averse, efficient and cost-effective migration.
“Our team initially supplied a discovery and documentation of the existing databases and GIS processes including versions, compute requirements, resources provisioning, application dependencies, users and more”, says Dave Lister, Principal Data Infrastructure.
This work involved understanding the current database server and GIS resource requirements and the complex database interconnections between applications. A critical exploration area was to identify the equivalent EC2 instance types and resource for a like-for-like architecture and performance.
“We assisted in identifying the impact and limitations of the AWS platform when compared to the current environment and provided recommendations for handling integration and linkage issues.” Lister goes on to say. Work was also carried out to optimise database allocations and to rationalise servers.
The project was completed late in 2020 with all systems successfully migrated.
Working within the WCC agile, collaborative approach, the Lynker Analytics team managed the migration of database and GIS systems and undertook the necessary go-live testing and troubleshooting to resolve issues as they arose. This included making any database server configuration changes needed to complete the transition to production.
Overall, this project has delivered a more resilient, scalable and secure data infrastructure which will position WCC to provide better services at a lower cost, ultimately resulting in enhanced services for Wellington’s ratepayers.
Deliverables:
Architectural advice mapping database and GIS systems, sizes and performance characteristics to the equivalent AWS services
Migration of Sybase and SQL Server database servers and GIS application stack to AWS
Go live support, system documentation and issue resolution.