Humanities Commons is an open, not-for-profit organization that is a project of the College of Arts & Letters of Michigan State University (MSU). It provides a social and professional network and knowledge exchange environment for scholars, researchers, and practitioners across the humanities and around the world.
The Humanities Commons (hcommons) web infrastructure needed to be migrated from the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) AWS environment to MSU’s new AWS account. The goal was to perform a lift-and-shift migration to MSU’s AWS environment, ensuring minimal disruption and maintaining the existing IP addressing schema to avoid conflicts.
The migration of the Humanities Commons (hcommons) web infrastructure from MLA’s AWS environment to MSU’s AWS account required meticulous planning and coordination between multiple stakeholders to ensure minimal disruption, especially as the web services were live and being extensively used by a large member community. The planning phase required identification of all components, including EC2 instances, RDS databases, VPC configurations, security groups, IAM roles, and other AWS services. Alongside this, requirements had to be gathered from MSU to understand their specific needs and constraints, including compliance, security, and performance requirements.
A detailed architecture was developed, ensuring it met all requirements and leveraged best practices for security, scalability, and availability. Operational plans were developed to deal with downtime, rollback procedures, backup and disaster recovery strategies, and communications.
The implementation phase involved setting up multiple VPCs for the different environments in the production AWS region, each with public and private subnets across multiple Availability Zones. The infrastructure, including resources such as subnets, route tables, and NAT gateways were created using AWS CloudFormation templates to ensure a consistent and repeatable setup. EC2 instances were migrated by creating AMIs in MLA’s account, sharing them with MSU’s account, and launching them in the same VPC and subnet. RDS instances were migrated using manual snapshots. Additional AWS services like ALBs, ElastiCache, and Elasticsearch were configured to support the environment. IAM policies, security groups, and WAF rules were configured to maintain security and compliance.
The comprehensive planning and execution approach ensured a successful migration of the Humanities Commons web infrastructure to MSU’s AWS environment, meeting all project goals and requirements. Cutover was completed successfully with minimal disruption and downtime. The new infrastructure further ensured high availability and fault tolerance, along with security measures like WAF and IAM policies.
Tgix provided detailed documentation of the new environment to MSU, including architecture diagrams, configuration details, and operational procedures. Knowledge transfer sessions were conducted with MSU’s IT team to ensure that they were equipped to manage and maintain the new environment.
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