Bridgewater College took their first step to AWS by taking part in a new AWS program named, Standard Play. In 2018, AWS created the Standard Play program that provides a variety of workshops to help higher education customers take their first steps into the AWS Cloud. Bridgewater, in need of modernizing their website infrastructure, decided to focus on its main public-facing website for the pilot of the technology.

As the AWS partner leading the Standard Play, M&S Consulting conducted a multi-day workshop to pilot the migration of Bridgewater’s website to AWS. M&S utilized infrastructure as code principals through CloudFormation to provide agility and consistency to the Bridgewater environment. After creating an initial landing zone from the Bridgewater applications, M&S focused on creating a solution that featured highly resilient and scalable infrastructure that included ephemeral design patterns. All servers were easy to replace automatically without data loss to the application, allowing for self-healing. After creating the infrastructure with automation, website files and data were migrated and placed in AWS EFS and AWS RDS.

At the end of the workshop, Bridgewater had a successfully migrated website in AWS that follows modern cloud architecture best practices and security principals. Bridgewater had solved issues that had plagued them for over ten years while enhancing its resiliency and scalability.