Daryn McCool was nice enough to share the story of Scholastic’s major IT modernization initiative with us. It was a great opportunity to have an enterprise customer walk through their journey to the cloud.
If you are considering an IT modernization project or looking for best practices in the community, I’d recommend watching the webinar.
A few themes stood out:
When faced with aging technologies and hardware EOLs Scholastic came to the conclusion, “We are not in the Datacenter business.” Scholastic did significant due diligence and ultimately chose to go with Amazon Web Services for their public cloud and Chef for automation as they moved away from their traditional datacenter. The results speak volumes. Daryn shared that provisioning went from 4-5 weeks in the datacenter to under an hour on AWS.
Part of Scholastic’s strategic migration from their legacy datacenter to AWS is always introducing automation into this transition. They treat infrastructure as code and 99% percent of the workload migration to AWS was automated.
Chris Munns from the AWS team echoed this trend, “This is a great example of moving to AWS. Customers take inventory of current practices and technologies, and shift to a new more flexible model”
Scholastic’s development and operations teams now work in completely new ways. As Daryn said, “The days of building servers manually from my point of view are gone.” Developers can throw things away and quickly re-build them with Chef and AWS. The IT administration staff had to learn development practices to take advantage of infrastructure automation capabilities.
If you’re looking for more specifics on: why Scholastic needed to move to the cloud, why they chose AWS and Chef, and how they migrated from a legacy infrastructure to AWS, watch the full recording of the webinar.