Lessons Learned: Sharing Public Cloud Adoption Best Practice at Met Office

At Automation Logic reflecting and sharing what we learn in delivery is crucial to our culture of continuous learning and ensures we can fulfil our commitment to our current and future clients, helping them to establish best practice.

We are currently partnered with the Met Office as they drive forward their public cloud adoption and embed best practice. One of our joint goals is to share knowledge through their Cloud Community of Practice.

Members of the Cloud Community of Practice include development teams, Solutions Architects, Product Owners, Project Managers, and other interested parties from right across the organisation.

Automation Logic organised a session at Met Office HQ in Exeter with two of our own speakers, Phillip Horrocks and Will Dutton.

The objective was to find out more about how other organisations have approached Cloud Adoption and how they’ve used partners to help them adopt a less siloed culture by embracing new technology and ways of working.

The first case study was from an executive agency of the UK Government where Automation Logic are currently helping develop a new automated infrastructure platform for IT systems that have been migrated to public cloud. The project overview covered some of the main technology improvements that have been implemented by the team.

Including:

• Migration of Legacy FTP systems to Serverless AWS technology.  Resulting in a more reliable, scalable and easier to manage system.
• Migration from a Citrix VDI environment to a new Windows 10 platform using AWS Workspaces. This has also been a major success and the work by the team was shortlisted for an excellence award.

The second case study focused on an eCommerce platform migration project for one of the UK’s leading supermarkets. During this presentation, we covered the architecture, design, and Agile ways of working to embrace cross-team collaboration.

The platform reduced web-related costs and sped up the time it takes for customers to make a purchase online, increasing average spend per customer.  It also moved from big waterfall monthly releases to smaller incremental releases (40-60 per month in production!).

The Cloud meetup ended with a Q&A session where we talked about DevOps and what it means for the Met Office. Automation Logic teams shared best practices and lessons learned from working with different clients in the private and public sectors.