Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board Cloud Migration

Shawn Kingsberry, Chief Information Officer

March 14, 2012

Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board

Cloud Migration

Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board ~ Cloud Migration

Agenda

• American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009• Recovery.gov Challenges• The Recovery.gov Process• Recovery.gov Redeployment• The Result• Solution Alternatives – Cloud Feasibility Assessment• Why Cloud Computing?• Recovery.gov Technologies• Recovery.gov Successful Cloud Move• FederalAccountability.gov• Questions?

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3Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board ~ Cloud Migration

Communicating Through Time

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdWN7BgdjaA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdWN7BgdjaA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdWN7BgdjaA


American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009The Law – February 2009

1) The website shall provide materials explaining what this Act means for citizens. The materials shall be easy to understand and regularly updated.

2) The website shall provide accountability information, including findings from audits, inspectors general, and the Government Accountability Office.

3) The website shall provide data on relevant economic, financial, grant, and contract information in user-friendly visual presentations to enhance public awareness of the use of covered funds.

4) The website shall provide detailed data on contracts awarded by the Federal Government that expend covered funds, including information about the competitiveness of the contracting process, information about the process that was used for the award of contracts, and for contracts over $500,000 a summary of the contract.

5) The website shall include printable reports on covered funds obligated by month to each State and congressional district.

6) The website shall provide a means for the public to give feedback on the performance of contracts that expend covered funds.

7) The website shall include detailed information on Federal Government contracts and grants that expend covered funds, to include the data elements required to comply with the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (Public Law 109-282), allowing aggregate reporting on awards below $25,000 or to individuals, as prescribed by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

8) The website shall provide a link to estimates of the jobs sustained or created by the Act.9) The website shall provide a link to information about announcements of grant competitions

and solicitations for contracts to be awarded.10) The website shall include appropriate links to other government websites with information

concerning covered funds, including Federal agency and State websites.11) The website shall include a plan from each Federal agency for using funds made available in

this Act to the agency.12) The website shall provide information on Federal allocations of formula grants and awards

of competitive grants using covered funds.13) The website shall provide information on Federal allocations of mandatory and other

entitlement programs by State, county, or other appropriate geographical unit.14) To the extent practical, the website shall provide, organized by the location of the job

opportunities involved, links to and information about how to access job opportunities, including, if possible, links to or information about local employment agencies, job banks operated by State workforce agencies, the Department of Labor's CareerOneStop website, State, local and other public agencies receiving Federal funding, and private firms contracted to perform work with Federal funding, in order to direct job seekers to job opportunities created by this Act.

15) The website shall be enhanced and updated as necessary to carry out the purposes of this subtitle.

H.R. 1 §1526 1. Provide easily accessible information to the public on Recovery spending and results

2. Promote official data in public debate

3. Provide fair and open access to Recovery opportunities

4. Enable public accountability for Recovery spending

5. Promote an understanding of the local impact of Recovery spending

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Recovery.gov Challenges

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• Design a website to be used by millions of citizens• Build a data mart to capture, warehouse, and report on data from several federal

and commercial data sets• Implement a geospatial analysis and visualization application to help citizens

understand the local impact of Recovery Act spending• Build and deploy an Enterprise Content Management System• Construct an Enterprise Search capability• Procure and install a large server data center enclave, with state of the art load

balancing, firewalls, switches and Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies


• The Public• Recipients• Press• Concerned Citizens• Administration• Special Interests• Congress• State and Local Gov• Agencies• RATB• Watchdogs• Academia and NGOs

The Recovery.gov Process

Issue Reporting

Agencies

Recipients

Data

Visualization

PressData

WarehouseSocial Media

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To satisfy the requirements of the Recovery Act, the solution architecture is actually a “system of systems.”

https://www.federalreporting.gov/federalreporting/home.do


Recovery.gov Redeployment

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• The aggressive schedule (Physical Infrastructure Delays)• Test and Development enclaves were procured and ready on Amazon

EC2 within 2 days of contract award on July 14, 2009• While the physical architecture was being procured and implemented,

the virtual infrastructure on the Cloud was fully built out in parallel• The Applications, Data, and Visualization teams had no delays since

they were not dependent on the physical infrastructure

Without Cloud computing the timelines could not have been achieved


The Result

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“The result is the current incarnation of Recovery.gov—which, as anyone who has spent significant amounts of time scouring government Web sites for information will tell you, is perhaps the clearest, richest interactive database ever produced by the American bureaucracy” –

Andre Romano, Newsweek

Recovery.gov was redeployed on September 28, 2009


Solution AlternativesCloud Feasibility Assessment

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Analysis Feasible

Performance Analysis – Web, Database, Geospatial, Bandwidth, I/O Cost Analysis – Elastic Compute, Storage, Bandwidth, Content Distribution Timeframe / Scope / Resource Analysis – Level of effort, impact on existing mission

Risk Analysis – Time, Security, High Availability, Complexity Gap Analysis – Storage, Backup Security Analysis – Access Control, Boundary Protection, Data at Rest Protection, Audit ability


Why Cloud Computing?

• Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996• The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative

– Promote the use of Green IT by reducing the overall energy and real estate footprint of government data centers;

– Reduce the cost of data center hardware, software, and operations;

– Increase the overall IT security posture of the government; and

– Shift IT investments to more efficient computing platforms and technologies

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Recovery.gov Technologies

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Social Media

Web Infrastructure

Visualization, Analysis, and Reporting

Data Layer

Infrastructure

http://www.flickr.com/

12Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board ~ Cloud Migration

Recovery.gov Cloud Architecture


Recovery.gov Successful Cloud Move

“Recovery.gov is the first government-wide system to move to the cloud... The Board expects savings of about $750,000 during its current budget cycle and

significantly more savings in the long-term.”

Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer – United StatesMay 13, 2010

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Recovery.gov was officially launched in a public cloud on April 26 at 9:48 PM

Our migration to the cloud took only 22 days from feasibility study to production


Benefits Gained by Moving to the Cloud

• Removal of physical hosting costs ~$750k over 3 years• Reuse / redistribution of ~ $700k of hardware/software for internal RATB use• No dependence on physical hosting provider:

o Powero Pipeo Storageo Backupo Database Management

• 3 yr Continuation of Operations (COOP) contract vs. 1 yr with no additional costs• First government-wide system to move to the Cloud• No Contract modifications required• Increased flexibility / lower lifecycle costs• Faster provisioning and ability to add capability on demand• Increased performance under high web demand

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The Cloud – Production Solution

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• Initial contract called for an identical Continuity/Disaster Recovery site• For the cost of the site, which would rarely be used, the RATB could instead build out a fully redundant,

highly available, and geographically separated solution on the Cloud at a fraction of the cost

Advantages– Improved website response times– Improved monitoring capabilities (CloudWatch, etc.)– Enhanced backup and recovery capabilities– Added ability to elastically grow or shrink compute capacity– Enhanced information assurance posture – Significantly lowered the costs of ownership– Repurpose 700k worth of hardware for Fraud, Waste and Abuse mission– Save hundreds of thousands on Data Center costs– Significantly reduce management costs of physical environment– Have an improved level of network access and fault tolerance– Be able to autoscale based on demand– Have a security posture consistent with that of a multi-billion dollar company– Prove that government innovation can save citizen’s money


Unprecedented Results

• Millions of users access Recovery.gov• One of the largest federal SharePoint sites ever created• One of the largest federal ESRI sites ever created• Several Accolades:

– 2009 Merit award: “Transforming open government from promise to practice”– 2010 Gold Addy award for website design– Official Honoree for the Financial Services category in The 14th Annual Webby

Awards– Award of Distinction during the 16th Annual Communicator Awards– 2nd place Gold Screen Award from the National Association of Government

Communicators– Information Week 500 – Federal Innovator of the Year

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Extending the capabilities of the Recovery Operations Center “ROC”

March 14, 2012

Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board

FederalAccountability.gov

Documents

Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board Cloud Migration