Case study · WA Government
Moving a public weather data platform to the cloud
DPIRD's free weather data service for WA growers had to move to Oracle Cloud on a tight deadline. We designed the cloud architecture and migration plan, and the cutover happened before the deadline with no downtime.
Outcomes
- 6M+ data requests a month handled by the platform that moved
- No downtime for users of the weather service when it cut over to the cloud
- On time the platform was rebuilt and migrated before DPIRD's deadline
The challenge
The Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) leads the sustainable development of Western Australia's regions and its agriculture, aquaculture, food and fisheries sectors. Its eConnect program runs a free weather data service for WA growers and other organisations, drawing on DPIRD's network of 192 weather stations and 8 Doppler rain radars. The service attracts 20,000 unique visitors and handles more than 6 million data requests a month.
The platform runs on an Oracle database, with services that process incoming weather data and expose it through RESTful APIs on a Docker cluster. DPIRD chose Oracle Cloud to host it, for its architectural fit with the existing on-premises system, staff upskilling, lower migration risk and ongoing cost-effectiveness. It engaged us to design a scalable cloud architecture and migration plan in line with its cloud adoption strategy.
The migration had a tight deadline. It could not disrupt the service to industry, or affect the 3G upgrade of DPIRD's network of automatic weather stations.
Our approach
Workshops mapped the current state and gave us a detailed understanding of what the Oracle cloud services could and could not do. We then worked in two stages.
First, we developed a migration strategy and high-level roadmap to set the overall approach and the principles for the solution design. Once DPIRD agreed the strategy, we produced a detailed solution design for the new weather data platform in the Oracle cloud. Second, we created a detailed roadmap and cutover plan showing the delivery team how to move the development, test and production environments to the cloud with minimal impact on the service's users.
To reduce risk and meet the deadline, the design changed the existing architecture as little as possible, while rationalising services to cut complexity and cloud cost. The Docker cluster was rebuilt on virtual machines in the Oracle cloud, so existing configuration, deployment scripts and support documentation could be reused. In parallel, the weather application and legacy components were containerised to run on the cluster, which simplified the architecture and lowered running costs.
Every build, migration and cutover task and its dependencies were tracked in the Jira instance DPIRD already used, so the team could see the whole plan and manage the critical path.
The outcome
DPIRD rebuilt and migrated the platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure before its deadline. The cutover to the new cloud-based weather data service caused no downtime for the growers and organisations who rely on it.
“Interfuze provided a clear approach contributing towards a reduction in migration and operational risk, enabling the successful migration of DPIRD's weather platform to the cloud. This resulted in a successful migration which was delivered on-time, under-budget, and with no impacts to business operations. Their level of professionalism and effective communication was an essential part of the success.”