The Office of Public Affairs is proud to announce that as of June 19th, 2020, Energy.gov is now operating using Amazon Web Services (AWS). The AWS Migration was a collaborative effort between the Energy.gov project team (Office of Public Affairs) and the OCIO Cloud and Operations teams to complete. This process began earlier this year to improve the site's security, performance, and scalability to support Energy.gov’s 50+ websites and over 3.5 million monthly visitors.
What Changed?
The Energy.gov project team and OCIO teams moved the Energy.gov website from its previous hosting platform to AWS. The new AWS platform is compliant and FedRAMP moderate approved. The site's previous architecture was replicated first, then improvements to optimize the site's overall performance were implemented. Once all migration activities were complete, the Energy.gov CMS Support team ensured previously published content was not lost and Energy.gov Content Editors did not lose their functionality to create and publish new content.
Why Was This Change Necessary?
Better security. Fewer outages. Highly scalable. More server controls.
Previously, Energy.gov experienced over 40 site outages in the past few years!
This means the website was down for all DOE employees and public site visitors unexpectedly. These outages accounted for almost 4000 minutes of down-time because of our previous cloud hosting architecture. The site also experienced latency during peak times with high visitor traffic.
YEAR | NUMBER OF OUTAGES | SERVICE DISRUPTION |
|---|---|---|
2016 | 5 | 166 MINUTES |
2017 | 10 | 844 MINUTES |
2018 | 10 | 1,196 MINUTES |
2019 | 14 | 1,568 MINUTES |
2020 | 4 | 90 MINUTES |
Government exists to serve citizens, and [the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act] ensures government leverages available technology to provide cohesive, user-friendly online service that people around this country expect and deserve.
According to the 21st Century IDEA Act, it is legally required for a Department site to have a consistent web appearance, secure web connection based on industry standards, and full availability for desktop and mobile device users. Based on these requirements, unplanned outage incidents would threaten Energy.gov's compliance.
With Amazon Web Services (AWS), Energy.gov is now equipped with more reliable tools to handle and balance higher volumes of site user traffic and prevent future service disruptions. The site is now enabled to offer a better user experience with faster loading times. We also have improved site monitoring and security measures to prevent site outages. By consolidating costs and resources, the change to AWS has provided a more robust, scalable cloud environment while saving tax payer funding with reduced monthly operational costs.
We hope you enjoy the new Energy.gov and have a great site experience!
Special thanks to the following teams and team members that supported the AWS transition:
DOE Leadership
Rocky Campione, Chief Information Officer
Kelsey Knight, Director of Communications
Bryan K. Long, Deputy CIO for Enterprise Operations
Bill Cooper, Executive Director for Public Affairs and General Counsel
Robbie Myers, Former Public Affairs (PA) Digital Director
Atiq Warraich, Energy.gov Application Owner
Chris Finucane, Associate Deputy CIO, IM-60
Greg Doan, Director IM-61, Infrastructure Operations
Jeff Toquinto, Director IM-63, Security and Compliance
Todd Brinson, Director IM-64, IT Service Management & Customer Advocacy
Aaron Wisner, OCIO Cloud Capability Lead
Edwin Villacorte, OCIO AWS Lead
John Fowlds, OCIO Network Operations
LaQuan Ippolito, OCIO Cybersecurity Operations
OCIO Cloud Platform Engineering Team
Hassan Babar, AWS Lead, AFS
Alain Bruno, AWS Migration Cloud Engineer, AFS
Michael Friedenthal, Consultant, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Rasika Jayaweera, RCS Consultant, (AWS)
Diwakar Puthalapat, Consultant, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Rudy Rihani, Cloud Platform Capability Lead, AFS
Energy.gov Application Team
David DiSanto, Program Office Lead, Accenture Federal Services (AFS)
Gaurav Jain, Drupal Delivery Lead, AFS
Joseph Still, Infrastructure Engineer, AFS/Phase2 Technologies
Bill Weisenburger, ScrumMaster, AFS/Phase2 Technologies
Frank Granger, Product Manager, AFS
Danielle Paige Mapp, Testing Lead, AFS
Ryon Grau, CMS Support Specialist, AFS
OCIO Infrastructure Operations & Security Team
Sharat Kayapanda, Infrastructure Operations Lead, AFS
Kevin Boucher, Solution Architect Senior Manager, AFS
Chris Paladino, Tech Arch Delivery Project Manager, AFS
Gurmit Malhi, Cloud Infrastructure Lead, AFS
Parvinder Raheja, Infrastructure Cloud Arch Delivery Manager, AFS
Jose Vistoso, Tech Arch Operations Manager, AFS
Al Lutz, Senior Consulting Senior Manager, AFS
Rich Fouke, Subject Matter Expert, AFS
Pamela Pagnotta, Storage Engineer, AFS
Nino Meksvanh, LINUX IT Service Manager, AFS
Bryan Farmer, UNIX System Admin, AFS
Michael Namaiandeh, Linux System Admin, AFS
Michael Tiernan, Senior IT Security Engineer, AFS/GDIT
Tim Morganthaler, Firewall Engineer, AFS/GDIT
Jeff Atlee, Firewall Engineer, AFS/GDIT
Rob Patrick, Sr Network Engineer, GDIT/Planet Technologies
Mike Burrows, Network Engineer, GDIT
Dan Mitton, Network Engineer, GDIT
Ryan Benisek, Senior IT Security Engineer, AFS/Rytek Solutions
