Challenge
This federal client had a huge public site with more than 100,000 artifacts running on proprietary, end-of-life CMS hosted in-house. This site encountered heavy traffic of about two million hits per month. The site was up because of the use of AKAMAI CDN. The webserver failed regularly, the site was not responsive, and the underlying CMS did not provide an elegant way to adopt a responsive design. Furthermore, the aging CMS was having trouble scaling with the growing content inventory. The project, awarded to Aquilent (the prime), aimed to help the client adopt a cloud strategy and help move away from the proprietary CMS to an open source alternative, Drupal.
Our Approach
One of Minipack’s principal consultants provided technical leadership on the project. It involved leading a multidisciplinary team over multiple years. We adopted a phased migration rather than a big switch approach so that the website was transitioned section-by-section to the cloud-hosted drupal implementation.
Result
The site, including its 100,000+ artifacts, migrated successfully over a period of one year with hardly any downtime for the public site. The site is now hosted in an auto-scaling, fault tolerant Amazon AWS hosting environment running on Drupal. The content editing workflow has become much more efficient. Based on Minipack’s work, the prime won a competitive bid and was re-awarded the contract for five more years. This case study was featured in Drupal Govcon 2015.