AWS Public Sector Partner Program (Government, Education and Not for Profit)

Integra becomes the first AWS Public Sector Program Partner in the Middle East !

The AWS Public Sector Partner Program (PSP) recognizes partners with solutions and experience in helping government, education, and nonprofit organizations around the world achieve their missions.

AWS has developed strong relationships with partners that deliver public sector specific solutions, and we’re thrilled to provide our customers with access to this network.

State Audit Institution, Governement of United Arab Emirates

State Audit Institution held an international conference (INCOSAI - International Conference of State Audit Institutions XXVI) in the UAE. The event is generally held once in 4 years in different member countries. The conference was designed as a completely paper-free digital event. Delegates from over a 170 countries were in attendance.

In view of the heavy and peaky web traffic expected, Integra was commissioned to develop a highly available, auto scalable web infrastructure to handle the event portal. Anticipating hits in the range of many thousands of requests per minute, especially during conference session start time, (at least 6 or sessions per day), we designed and built an infrastructure at short notice to handle the heaviest burst of traffic.

Mobile apps, traditional web applications and static assets were delivered to the end users seamlessly, without encountering any 5xx errors at all.

Technologies used: AWS, EC2, Auto Scaling, S3, CloudWatch, RDS, CloudFormation, EBS, CodeDeply, ELB, CloudFront

American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

AUS has a hypervisor cluster with multiple hypervisor nodes, and numerous other physical servers running a variety of applications, including Zimbra Collaboration Suite, learning applications and other student facing applications. As the number of servers grew, it became increasingly complicated to maintain the systems, keep all of them patched, and to make sure that it was compliant with the necessary standards. Hence it was proposed that Red Hat Satellite Server 6 be implemented. The required management subscriptions were also suggested.

Red Hat Satellite was deployed at AUS on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RHEL was installed as a VM, and Satellite installed on the VM. Physical servers not having management add on were subscribed to the channel, and the unlimited virtual guest subscriptions were added on to the RHEL for Virtual Data Center Subscriptions. The necessary subscriptions were attached to the Satellite Server, the different repositories enabled and synched to the server and additional custom EPEL repositories were synched as well.Host collections as required was then setup. Activation keys were setup, and the clients were registered. For Virtual Data Centers, a VM was registered and virt-who service enabled. Host Groups were created as well. Lifecycle environments (Development/Test/Production) and content views were created and enabled. Puppet modules for configuration management was also enabled. katello-backup was configured for taking backups of the satellite environment.

Immediate benefit was the ease of management of the different RHEL systems deployed as Virtual machines on vmware environment and on different physical hardware. Satellite gives a birds eye view of the whole RHEL environment at AUS, and make configuration management, patching and deployment of REHL servers much more easy and painless - and ensures compliance with AUS standards for security and legal compliance.

Gulf Medical University

Gulf Medical University wanted to deploy new Oracle based ERP solution to cater to the ever growing needs of the University. We were approached for doing the infrastructure design in consultation with the Oracle team. The solution need to have always on and a highly available model for the production servers and a test and staging environment.

This is currently a multi server Red Hat Enterprise Linux setup on mostly HP hardware, with servers running Oracle databases in an Active/Passive cluster. There are E-Business Application servers, BI Application Servers, BI Database servers, iSupplier/iSourcing servers, test and development servers and a Zmanda (Amanda) based backup server.

Deploying the solution on a Red Hat Enterprise Server platform with high availability/resilient storage components enables GMU to leverage the functionality provided by Oracle platform to scale up and streamline operations of the University to enhance productivity for staff, students, suppliers and the procurement departments. The solution is designed to be scaled up as and when added demand kicks in.