"We have no concerns about security or compliance. It's not easy to replicate the same security levels that we have on premises, but working in AWS, we're confident that we're following best practices for data protection, network access, and other security measures", Leandro Gelasi, IT Officer
The Challenge Despite its long-established roots,Corte dei conti (Cdc)isn’t an institution that has remained entrenched in the past. It understands that modernization is key to keeping relevant in a fast-moving world, and as a result it has embraced change in its processes and structure. IT has been central to this. Leandro Gelasi, IT officer at Corte dei conti, says,“We have a deep commitment to continuous improvement, and to support this goal we need an agile and elastic IT infrastructure.” Gelasi and his team wanted to move away from time-consuming management of physical IT. “We wanted to focus on providing an excellent service, rather than on handling hardware,” he says. A larger initiative to boost employee productivity went hand in hand with this efficiency drive, as Gelasi continues, “We wanted to change the way our 3,000-plus employees worked, enabling them to access applications from anywhere, on any device. But we had to ensure that this flexibility for staff didn’t jeopardize the safety of data.” Given its high-profile role in keeping public finances in check—and with the Italian government requiring agencies to cut IT expenditure in line with wider budget cuts—Cdc also had to focus on reducing its own costs. With a largely Citrix-based infrastructure, Corte dei conti had invested a lot in training its staff in this technology. It wanted to make the most of this investment, while at the same time making its architecture more agile.

Why Amazon Web Services The answer was a hybrid cloud environment, and Cdc chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AWS Advanced Consulting Partner XPeppers to help it in this journey, starting with adopting a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) based on Amazon WorkSpaces. Gelasi says, “We looked at AWS and realized it was the perfect platform for our migration to the cloud. We had worked with XPeppers before, so it was our first choice to help us move to AWS and ensure seamless integration with our Citrix environment.” The infrastructure runs on 25 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which run only during office hours, between 8:00 am and 8:00 pm. Cdc uses AWS Lambda to orchestrate the startup and shutdown for each instance. Each department has a dedicated Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and a virtual private network connection between the VPCs and Cdc’s data centers. Paolo Latella, solutions architect at XPeppers, says, “Because it deals with sensitive data, Corte dei conti needs a secure architecture. We worked with Cdc to explain best practices in the cloud, ensuring that it maintains the highest security levels.” For example, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps the court control access to resources, and Amazon CloudWatch allows the team to keep applications running smoothly. Plus, through the AWS Marketplace, Cdc can choose the software and services it needs to implement a security model that replicates its on-premises structure.

The Benefits First and foremost, Gelasi and his team feel safe working in the cloud. “We have no concerns about security or compliance,” he says. “It’s not easy to replicate the same security levels that we have on premises, but working in AWS, we’re confident that we’re following best practices for data protection, network access, and other security measures.”
He continues, “The service that our users are getting is vastly improved. We have very little feedback, which is great for us. No news is good news in IT.” In addition, internal users have more flexibility and can access applications on their laptops, tablets, and smartphones from anywhere. “We have made it possible for court employees such as magistrates to work effectively from home. Previously, they could only access applications from the office, but now they can do this wherever they are. As a result, they’re much more productive. Decisions get made faster and the whole system works better. It’s a brilliant result for our entire organization,” says Gelasi. Managing processes is also easier, so the Cdc IT team can focus on developing services for both internal and external clients. One of the IT team’s goals in the organization’s larger drive to boost efficiency is to provide services to government agencies across Italy. Gelasi says, “With our AWS infrastructure, it’s easier for us to offer IT to other institutions, which helps them cut costs in line with government initiatives.” “We’re saving money in the cloud too,” he continues. “By moving to AWS, we avoided €40,000 in hardware costs.” Operating expenses are more difficult to determine, but Gelasi is convinced that with the VDI project, Cdc is cutting energy consumption and saving money on air conditioning and electricity. “One of the drivers of the project was to get better visibility of costs and be more accountable,” he says. “As we move more of our infrastructure to the AWS cloud, we’ll be able to do this too.” Having successfully deployed VDI to 250 users across Cdc, the team is now rolling it out across all of the organization’s regions, eventually giving its 3,000 employees the tools to be more productive. The court is also working with XPeppers to build its disaster recovery on AWS and move more workloads to the cloud for improved agility. “The biggest benefit of working in the AWS cloud? I can’t pinpoint just one,” says Gelasi. “It’s the whole package. We’ve got more flexibility, we can scale seamlessly, and we have more time to provide a great service to our customers.”

Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been working around the world—and off of it—for almost 60 years, trying to answer some basic questions: What’s out there in space? How do we get there? What will we find? What can we learn there, or learn just by trying to get there, that will make life better here on Earth?
Exploring Space: No Rocket Science Degree Needed Have you ever looked up at night and wondered about the mysteries of space? Or marveled at the expansiveness of our galaxy? You can easily explore all this and more at the NASA Image and Video Library, which provides easy access to more than 140,000 still images, audio recordings, and videos—documenting NASA’s more than half a century of achievements in exploring the vast unknown. For NASA, providing the public with such easy access to the wonders of space has been a journey all its own. NASA began providing online access to photos, video, and audio in the early 2000’s, when media capture began to shift from analog and film to digital. Before long, each of NASA’s 10 field centers was making its imagery available online, including digitized versions of some older assets. Therein was the challenge: “With media in so many different places, you needed institutional knowledge of NASA to know where to look,” says Rodney Grubbs, imagery experts program manager at NASA. “If you wanted a video of the space shuttle launch, you had to go to the Kennedy Space Center website. If you wanted pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, you went to the Goddard Space Flight Center website. With 10 different centers and dozens of distributed image collections, it took a lot of digging around to find what you wanted.” Early efforts to provide a one-stop shop consisted of essentially “scraping” content from the different sites, bringing it together in one place, and layering a search engine on top. “In large part, those initial efforts were unsuccessful because each center categorized its imagery in different ways,” says Grubbs. “As a result, we often had five to six copies of the same image, each described in different ways, which made searches difficult and delivered a poor user experience.” In 2011, NASA decided that the best approach to address this issue was to start over. By late 2014, all the necessary pieces for a second attempt were in place:

• The Imagery Experts Program had developed and published a common metadata standard, which all NASA’s centers had adopted.

• The Web Enterprise Service Technologies (WESTPrime) service contract, one of five agency-wide service contracts under NASA’s Enterprise Services program, provided a delivery vehicle for building and managing the new site.

• The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.

“We wanted to build our new solution in the cloud for two reasons,” says Grubbs. “By 2014, like with many government agencies, NASA was trying to get away from buying hardware and building data centers, which are expensive to build and manage. The cloud also provided the ability to scale with ease, as needed, paying for only the capacity we use instead of having to make a large up-front investment.”
Decades of NASA Achievements – All in One Place Development of the new NASA Image and Video Library was handled by the Web Services Office within NASA’s Enterprise Service and Integration Division. Technology selection, solution design, and implementation was managed by InfoZen, the WESTPrime contract service provider. As an Advanced Consulting Partner of the AWS Partner Network (APN), InfoZen chose to build the solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Amazon was the largest cloud services provider, had a strong government cloud presence, and offered the most suitable cloud in terms of elasticity,” recalls Sandeep Shilawat, Cloud Program Manager at InfoZen. NASA formally launched its Image and Video Library in March 2017. Key features include:

• A user interface that automatically scales for PCs, tablets, and mobile phones across virtually every browser and operating system.

• A search interface that lets people easily find what they’re looking for, including the ability to choose from gallery view or list view and to narrow-down search results by media type and/or by year.

• The ability to easily download any media found on the site—or share it on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

• Access to the metadata associated with each asset, such as file size, file format, which center created the asset, and when it was created. When available, users can also view EXIF/camera data for still images such as exposure, shutter speed, and lens used.

• An application programming interface (API) for automated uploads of new content—including integration with NASA’s existing authentication mechanism.

Architecture The NASA Image and Video Library is a cloud-native solution, with the front-end web app separated from the backend API. It runs as immutable infrastructure in a fully automated environment, with all infrastructure defined in code to support continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). In building the solution, InfoZen took advantage of the following Amazon Web Services:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. This enables NASA to scale up under load and scale down during periods of inactivity to save money, and pay for only what it uses.

• Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), which is used to distribute incoming traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances, as required to achieve redundancy and fault-tolerance.

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which supports object storage for incoming (uploaded) media, metadata, and published assets.

• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), which is used to decouple incoming jobs from pipeline processes.

• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which is used for automatic synchronization and failover.

• Amazon DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database service, which is used to track incoming jobs, published assets, and users.

• Amazon Elastic Transcoder, which is used to transcode audio and video to various resolutions.

• Amazon CloudSearch, which is used to support searching by free text or fields.

• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), which is used to trigger the processing pipeline when new content is uploaded.

• AWS CloudFormation, which enables automated creation, updating, and destruction of AWS resources. InfoZen also used the Troposphere library, which enables the creation of objects via AWS CloudFormation using Python instead of hand-coded JSON—each object representing one AWS resource such as an instance, an Elastic IP (EIP) address, or a security group.

• Amazon CloudWatch, which provides a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications running on AWS.

An Image and Video Library for the Future Through its use of AWS, with support from InfoZen, NASA is making its vast wealth of pictures, videos, and audio files—previously in some 60 “collections” across NASA’s 10 centers—easily discoverable in one centralized location, delivering these benefits:

• Easy Access to the Wonders of Space. The Image and Video Library automatically optimizes the user experience for each user’s particular device. It is also fully compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which requires federal agencies to make their technology solutions accessible to people with disabilities. Captions can be turned on or off for videos played on the site, and text-based caption files can be downloaded for any video.

• Built-in Scalability. All components of the NASA Image and Video Library are built to scale on demand, as needed to handle usage spikes. “On-demand scalability will be invaluable for events such as the solar eclipse that’s happening later this summer—both as we upload new media and as the public comes to view that content,” says Bryan Walls, Imagery Experts Deputy Program Manager at NASA.

• Good Use of Taxpayer Dollars. By building its Image and Video Library in the cloud, NASA avoided the costs associated with deploying and maintaining server and storage hardware in-house. Instead, the agency can simply pay for the AWS resources it uses at any given time.

While NASA’s new Image and Video Library delivers a wealth of new convenience and capabilities, for people like Grubbs and Walls, it’s just the beginning. “We now have an agile, scalable foundation on which to do all kinds of amazing things,” says Walls. “Much like with the exploration of space, we’re just starting to imagine all that we can do with it.”