EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Ministry of Labour and Social Development (MLSD) is working to implement an integrated system of services for various segments of society. They are also determined to achieve welfare and social security, provide decent work opportunities, and to enhance the work environment. In addition to providing various services and social care, according to a tight organizational strategy they aim to contribute positively and effectively to regulate the labour market in Bahrain.

Moreover, the Ministry was able to do all this by developing legislation, laws, and regulatory procedures in line with the changes in the labour market, and they aimed to achieve effective integration of the national workforce in various economic sectors. Besides, the Ministry draws up the methodologies for developing the national workforce in the private sector to achieve real investment in the human resources of the Kingdom of Bahrain.

REQUIREMENT/ PROBLEMS:

Ministry of Labour and Social Development (MLSD) is running a social assistance program to provide social assistance to families in need. The system was launched in 2006 and MLSD wants to modernize the system and move it to a flexible cost-efficient cloud platform.

As part of the AWS Migration journey, initiated by iGA, MYS decided to migrate their oracle workloads, Web Servers and CRM servers and the underlying Database to AWS. As a pre-requisite to the applications migration, their AD was extended to AWS for authentication purposes.

Like other on premises applications MLSD faces the below challenges:

• The Original platform was developed in Oracle ADF 10 and hosted on WebLogic 10g utilizing Oracle Database 11g on RAC. MLSD wants to reduce the cost of running the system while maintaining the performance and reliability while moving to open-source solutions.
• Some of the applications will need to be deployed and dropped multiple times.
• The users need to access the UAT environment from anywhere.
• Upgraded database version compatibility with upgraded application is not clear and will need to be tested extensively.
• OS compatibility with application needs to be tested and confirmed.

WHY AMAZON WEB SERVICES?

Evaluated several cloud platforms before ultimately selecting AWS. The deciding factors were the reliability, extensive ecosystem of partners and services, and competitive pricing that AWS offered, as well as AWS customer service.

• Leading public cloud provider
• Pay as you go approach
• AWS free tier
• Performance
• Fast Deployment

SOLUTION:

MLSD with the collaboration with ACME, upgraded the ADF to 11.2.04 and hosted it on open-source glassfish server hosted on EC2 and converted from Oracle JDK to Amazon Correto (OpenJDK). Moreover, the database will be upgraded from 11g to 19c and hosted on Amazon RDS Multi AZ.

The entire migration was meticulously planned and migrated within a short timeline. The test environments were migrated initially, which benefited MLSD.

THE BENEFITS OF MLSD:

MLSD has their application hosted in a more robust and rigid platform as compared to their earlier Infrastructure at a much-reduced cost.

• Decreased implementation time by eliminating the need to purchase and install servers and storage.
• Optimized uptime with a Monthly Uptime Percentage of at least 99.95% using Amazon RDS (Multi-AZ)
• Allows team to focus on delivering value to the business.
• Very simple to deploy I/O heavy workloads and dynamically scale the applications and database as needed. “Using AWS, scaling up instance sizes to add compute power for overnight batch processing,” has become very easy. Further, the ability to dynamically scale resources in AWS provides much more flexibility.”
• Easy implementation of Oracle RMAN backups to Amazon S3. The DBAs found it easy to start backing up their databases to Amazon S3 and directing Oracle RMAN backups to Amazon S3 requires very minimal configuration.
• Optimized Database uptime of approx. 99.94%.
• Ability to provision multiple instances on the go for application upgrade testing.
• Ability to resize storage on the go.
• Base AMI creation for each OS for compatibility testing.
• Ability to provision multiple databases with different versions to test compatibility.
• User accessibility, i.e., all the users can access the application even from outside the premises without the need of setting up physical network to support the application.
• Furthermore, provides other benefits such as Security, Flexibility, Scalability, Durability, Performance and Lower costs.