NASA WESTPrime: Taking an Entire Agency to the Cloud in Under Six Months

NASA WESTPrime: Taking an Entire Agency to the Cloud in Under Six Months

CLIENTNASAROLESignificant Subcontractor, WESTPrimeSERVICESCloud Migration / AWS / Infrastructure Design / DevOps / CDN / Security / O&M

Highlights

  • Migrated more than 50 applications from NASA’s legacy datacenter to AWS in under six months, a timeline NASA described as unprecedented for a project of this scale
  • Designed and deployed infrastructure for NASA’s Public cloud, Private cloud, and GovCloud environments, including Direct Connect between WESTPrime’s AWS presence and NASA’s internal network
  • Built and deployed the cloud infrastructure for nasa.gov, migrated NASA’s wikis and blogs to open-source WordPress, and transitioned NASA TV streaming to a new CDN with an HTML5-compatible video player
  • Traffic on the completed infrastructure rivals CNN and other major commercial and government high-traffic sites
  • NASA Group Achievement Award recipient: “Taking NASA into the Cloud”
  • Drastic cost reductions and reduced operational complexity delivered alongside a state-of-the-art technical environment

Challenge

Under NASA’s I3P program, the WESTPrime contract charged the team with establishing a Platform as a Service environment for NASA to host applications and services across the agency’s cloud infrastructure. The scope was substantial: create a new managed cloud environment, migrate a catalog of applications and services from a legacy datacenter, work with application owners through user acceptance testing, and stabilize operations after the migration.

The applications involved ranged from nasa.gov itself to internal tools, wikis, blogs, streaming infrastructure, and sensitive systems requiring GovCloud environments for ITAR-controlled data. Many had not received an Authorization to Operate review in years. The migration could not simply move what existed: it had to harden what was moved, bring systems into compliance, and deliver a fully operational environment at the end.

The expected timeline for a project of this scale was seven to nine months. NASA needed it done faster.

Action

As the significant subcontractor on WESTPrime, V! Studios established all cloud environments and completed the migration of NASA’s full catalog of applications, services, and systems to AWS within the first five months of the contract.

The infrastructure work covered three distinct environments: a Public cloud for externally accessible applications, a NASA-only Private cloud, and a GovCloud environment for sensitive and ITAR-controlled data. V! Studios established the NASA cloud network architecture from the ground up, including IP space, virtual private clouds, and Direct Connect between the WESTPrime AWS presence and NASA’s internal network.

Migration work included porting more than 50 legacy applications into newly created WESTPrime cloud instances without server, application, or database snapshots. For each application, V! Studios conducted design reviews, hardened security controls, worked with agency governance organizations and security contractors, and obtained Authorizations to Operate, many for the first time in years.

Additional scope included building and deploying the cloud infrastructure for nasa.gov with Drupal and a GlusterFS shared filesystem; migrating NASA’s wikis and blogs from a proprietary CMS to open-source WordPress; transitioning NASA TV streaming from Akamai to LimeLight CDN and upgrading the video player to an HTML5-compatible player; establishing CloudFront CDN for nasa.gov; migrating more than 8,000 videos from a proprietary platform to YouTube; and deploying a new ElasticSearch-based search engine across 55 instances for the NASA Engineering Network.

V! Studios also resolved outgoing NASA newsletter email delivery through AWS without spam-filter interception, integrated third-party subscription management via MailGun, and deployed Captcha infrastructure for nasa.gov. At the conclusion of the migration, V! Studios transitioned operations and maintenance of the cloud infrastructure to the prime contractor’s employees, including onboarding training.

Result

NASA had a fully functioning, agency-wide managed cloud environment in under six months. The citation from the NASA Group Achievement Award captures what that meant in operational terms: NASA’s flagship portal handling live streaming traffic exceeding 1M Mbps and 1,000 TB in a 48-hour period, and website traffic of approximately 100,000 requests per second delivering data at 13,000 Mbps across 70 TB in a 48-hour period. The award citation noted that these figures rival those of major commercial sites, including CNN.

The migration delivered drastic cost reductions and reduced operational complexity while placing NASA on a modern, maintainable cloud infrastructure capable of scaling to the agency’s actual demand.

“This is an unprecedented transition where most projects of this magnitude would take up to 7–9 months. NASA’s flagship portal can see traffic for live streaming of over 1M/mbps with a volume of over 1000 TB in a 48 hour period and for web site traffic of about 100K requests/sec to deliver data at 13K/mbps with a volume of about 70 TB in a 48 hour period. These numbers rival many commercial websites such as CNN and other government high traffic sites such as NOAA.”NASA Group Achievement Award citation: “Taking NASA into the Cloud”

Impact

Migrating more than 50 applications for a federal science agency in under six months, while obtaining ATOs, hardening security posture, building three distinct cloud environments, and keeping nasa.gov operational throughout, is not a routine cloud migration. It is a demonstration of what a team looks like when it has done this work before, knows where the failure modes are, and has built the processes to avoid them.

The traffic figures in the award citation are the proof. A cloud infrastructure that can carry NASA TV live streaming and nasa.gov web traffic at CNN-scale volumes, delivered in under half a year from a legacy datacenter starting point, is not the result of following a standard playbook. It is the result of engineering judgment applied under real pressure, to a real deadline, for a client whose infrastructure has no tolerance for failure.

V! Studios has continued building on this foundation through subsequent NASA contracts. The WESTPrime migration was not a starting point for a relationship that would evolve. It was evidence that the relationship was already operating at the level NASA needed to serve the American public.