Managing the Murray-Darling river system is a complex business, and requires a fresh online presence to better engage with a range of stakeholders.
The Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) was established to take responsibility for planning the entire Basin's water resources. Sustainable management of the river system is a collective endeavour of the various ‘basin states’ and the Australian Federal Government, along with industries and communities who depend on the river system.
The MDBA intended to change web-hosting services from its incumbent provider to a new cloud-based provider. To have minimal disruption on day-to-day operations, a one-off data migration was required.
Datacom designed the new website using Drupal, prepared the migration plan and migrated the website content to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.
Taking a DevOps approach to cloud setup, security and migration, Datacom drew together a virtual team of experts from across different locations. The ACT team provided project management, Datacom’s National AWS practice provided AWS architecture and tenancy setup, and the Auckland team provided Drupal architecture and build activities. A technical team optimised the strengths based at each site.
It took a considerable effort to resolve the complexities of the existing web-hosting services before design and migration to AWS could take place.
Team members went above and beyond expectations to complete the work, while maintaining a laser-like focus on the ambitious migration target date. The MDBA team provided technical information promptly, reviewed design documents and conducted verification tests. Their quick turnaround greatly contributed to the project’s success.
The project was a fixed-price engagement of professional services commencing mid-January 2017. The migration was completed on schedule in March 2017.
The strong collaborative effort of everyone involved ensured the migration was completed successfully and on time.
There were two key factors which contributed to the project’s success:
- The commitment of the joint project team to achieve the project on schedule; and
- The close working relationship established between MDBA and the project team as a whole.
The migration of the MDBA website to AWS has reduced hosting costs and provided a more flexible, scalable and robust design.