>> Announcer: From Seattle, Washington,
it's theCUBE, covering AWS Imagine,
brought to you by Amazon Web Services.
>> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE.
We're in downtown Seattle
at the AWS Imagine Education event.
It's the second year of the event.
It's about 800 people.
We were here last year too, I think it was 400 people,
so it's growin' quickly, like everything.
At AWS, it's all about education
that's public school, private school, university,
K through 12, community college, everything you can imagine.
It's a really comprehensive kind of area
that Amazon's focusing on.
We're excited to have our next guest
really from the school district.
We haven't had anyone from the school district.
He's Travis Paakki, the Senior Director Information Services
for Portland Public School.
I'm a proud graduate of the Portland Public School System,
so Travis great to see you.
>> Great to see you.
>> Absolutely, so first off impressions of the show.
You said you weren't able to make it this year,
got to sit in the keynotes this morning
with Theresa and Andrew couple sessions,
just kind of your impressions at being at an event like this.
>> You know it's really fantastic to have an event
that ties together AWS and eduction
and in that education space.
It's a great resource for people
that are using AWS within the education community,
so this has been fantastic.
>> Yeah, it's good, 'cause education's
not necessarily touted as the most progressive industry.
>> Exactly
>> So the fact that they made this commitment
is pretty significant.
>> Yeah, exactly >> So, you've had a
recent significant event
within your IT journey and Cloud journey.
I wonder if you can tell us
what you guys just recently completed.
>> Sure, so we recently migrated our PeopleSoft application
from our on-prem data center to the Cloud,
and one of the real challenges we had
was there was no extra money to do this work,
so we had kind of come across the idea
that the hardware was the end of life.
It was going to be about a $500,000 replacement cost.
In addition to that, we had several on-staff positions
that really weren't fillable.
It had become such a niche skill set
that we really had a lot of trouble
trying to get those positions filled.
So, in addition to that, my boss came around the corner
and said, "By the way, we have a 10% budget cut."
So, how do we resolve all of that
plus address this really big problem
with the system not even >> And time was ticking right
You're hardware time was ticking.
>> It was really bad, I mean we were at a point
where we were getting nine, 10 second page refresh times,
and the user community had kind of gotten to the point
where our numbers for satisfaction looked really good
because we didn't get complaints
because the user community had gotten so disillusioned
by making those complaints and not getting any results
that they just gave up on complaining,
so we were out of time.
>> You're out of time,
so typically a Cloud migration of an old application
is not necessarily the easiest place
to get started on your Cloud journey.
>> Yes
>> And did you already have some experience with Cloud
or was this really kind of your first foray into this area?
>> You know I had worked at a start-up a few years before,
and we did our entire infrastructure on AWS
so that was my introduction to AWS and AWS services.
And there was a lot of people
that were looking away from that as a solution.
It didn't seem like the viable thing to do,
and yes we were advised not to try the ERP first,
but that was our use case.
And if we were going to do it,
we were going to do it big, so we did.
>> So you brought in some consultants I would assume
that helped out or did you guys do it all in house?
>> Actually what we did was
we looked for a managed service provider,
so our use case in that we had many positions
that we couldn't get filled was
that we needed the virtual infrastructure
but we also needed the people
to do some of those tasks for us.
So that was our partnership was we work
with a managed solution provider called Highstreet,
and Highstreet really helped us with that process.
>> And so how long did it take,
when did you get it complete?
>> We went from idea to completion in four months.
>> Idea to completion in four months?
>> Yes >> Wow!
>> Yeah, and that was unprecedented.
Nobody expected it to work
and certainly nobody expected it to work that fast
and when you do these migrations
you understand that it is going
to be a high-stress situation
and one of the major things that AWS did for us
was it gave us that virtual infrastructure
so that we could run in tandem.
We could actually continue to run
completely as we were in production
and run the new systems and run all the tests,
so we were able to get cut over
in no time with almost no stress.
I think we had one problem when we went live.
>> So then what did your boss say
when you came around the corner?
(both laugh)
Good job, Travis.
>> Good job, yes.
>> Okay great, so you know, there's a whole bunch
of components to Cloud right that have a lot of benefits,
security, like we said it's actually
a lot more secure than a lot of times your own stuff.
There's cost savings
and there's infrastructure leverage that you can get,
but more importantly, and we've heard
a lot of the stories here
is that it opens up an opportunity for innovation.
It opens up an opportunity to try new things, to move fast,
so I wonder is that is kind of a unintended consequence
of this process or do you think
you've kind of sold the in-house people,
look it worked we did it fast.
I assume it's close to budget or close to timing
and now I sit here for two days
and listen to all the crazy, cool innovative things
that people are doing with Alexa, et cetera,
so I mean where do you go, where do you go next?
>> One of the unintended consequences of it
was granting us a DR process,
so we had a very basic DR system in place
and by moving to the Cloud,
not only did we make it insulated from any events
that might happen in our primary building,
which is also our primary data center,
but it gave us that ability to fail over
and persist through a significant event.
One of the other things it's done though
is it's given our developers access to tools
that they just didn't have access to before,
so one of the places
where we're experimenting pretty heavily in is Lambda.
So, serverless functions,
trying to get to the point
where we can enhance our existing software
by making calls out to our Amazon VPC
and data that exists out there
without having to make hard core modifications
to the internal systems.
>> Right.
>> We were actually able
to do a demo of that within 30 minutes,
so that normal process would take about two weeks to write.
>> So is there, is there new stuff on the horizon?
Is this, are you just like kid in a candy store,
like now look at the power, flexibility that we have
that we just didn't have
kind of strapped to our old data center before?
>> Absolutely, right now, we're tryin' to,
I think the biggest struggle is trying
to figure out what we tackle next.
There's a lot of things out there.
You know, we have a data interchange platform.
It would be great if we could replace that
with AWS functions and Lambda calls.
I think that's probably going to be
our next biggest tackle is that.
After that, we'd really like to start
rewriting some of our in-house written apps
completely in AWS services,
and I think that's going to be a huge win for the District.
>> Okay, and then do you guys purchase
a lot of these other software applications?
There's a lot of companies here that have,
Blackboard is just the one that always comes into my head.
Not to pick on them specifically,
but do you guys have a ton
of those types of applications installed as well?
>> We definitely tend to leverage bot first.
>> Okay
>> But some of them, like SchoolMint,
have been fantastic partners for us,
and that's one of the ones that we've really leaned on
because of how intricate some of our policies are.
SchoolMint has the capability to implement that for us.
>> Right, right.
Well, sounds pretty exciting.
>> Yep, it has been.
>> But the question is,
when does the grand opening of Grant,
that's what I want to know. (Travis laughs)
I need the date, so afterwards you can send me the date.
That's where I went to high school,
they just finished a beautiful remodel.
I don't even know how much >> It's fantastic.
>> Millions and millions of dollars that were spent,
but a lot.
>> Very, yes, a lot.
>> All right, well Travis congratulations,
four month ERP move.
I don't know, you throw that out as a challenge
maybe somebody else can beat it,
I don't know that's pretty good.
>> Absolutely >> All right
Thanks for stopping by.
>> Thank you.
>> All right, he's Travis, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE.
We're at AWS Imagine Education in downtown Seattle.
Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.