COUNTRY FOCUS : CARIBBEAN
A key part of JPS ’ s successful transition has been AWS Instance Scheduler , which can be used to configure schedules for Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances .
“ Deploying the mobile app in the cloud was a game changer ,” said Hamilton . “ We ’ d allotted one week for the deployment of supporting infrastructure , but we were able to complete the process in less than one day .”
JPS also found that most of its costs came from nonproduction environments .
About Jamaica Public Service Company
Jamaica Public Service Company Limited is an integrated electric utility company and the sole distributor of electricity in Jamaica . It engages in the generation , transmission and distribution of electricity for over 680,000 customers .
“ We work with in-house and third-party developers ,” said Hamilton . “ Using AWS Instance Scheduler , we can manage which Amazon EC2 instances are active based on team needs and work schedules , using only what is needed and drastically lowering our development costs .”
The mobile app was a tremendous success and one of the biggest wins of our migration to AWS .
The migration to AWS became even more valuable when around 60 % of the company ’ s offices closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic . JPS also used AWS to provide high-quality customer support and near-realtime usage data through Amazon QuickSight , which facilitates everyone in an organization understanding its data by asking questions in natural language , exploring interactive dashboards or automatically looking for patterns .
Another staple of JPS ’ s operations is Amazon Simple Storage Service ( Amazon S3 ), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability , data availability , security and performance .
“ The mobile app was a tremendous success and one of the biggest wins of our migration to AWS ,” said Hamilton .
“ Deploying the mobile app was the first time in my more than seven years of working on the JPS infrastructure team that we could simply spin up entire solutions with no performance issues due to how easily we can configure , deploy and scale the infrastructure ,” said Hamilton . “ Downtime is now non-existent for us .”
That agility is also conducive to development and testing . One of the largest pain points for project development was being able to provision servers for specific projects and tests .
“ Those concerns went away entirely on AWS because we can spin up a server in minutes ,” said Hamilton . “ It ’ s no longer a US $ 10,000 investment to add a new server .”
In total , JPS ’ s cloud-based solutions have brought on more than 300,000 new users . It now has more than 200,000 active monthly users with at least 2,000 concurrent users at any time . With more than one-third of its customer base using the app to track usage and place service requests , JPS must manage fewer calls from customers .
By using AWS Instance Scheduler and other AWS services , the company has increased the overall dependability of its infrastructure while reducing manual work and costs .
Continuing the migration and expanding use cases
Running on agile cloud infrastructure means that JPS no longer has to plan five to seven years into the future .
“ We have a small , intimate team , and we ’ ve offloaded a lot of operational work to AWS ,” said Hamilton . “ Using AWS has been a tremendous boost to productivity and innovation .”
The company has also bolstered the reliability and robustness of its systems .
The cloud journey is on-going for JPS as it continues migrating more applications and enterprise solutions to the cloud . The company also plans to use AWS for analytics work to improve its forecasting abilities . And in this year , JPS will fully migrate its most critical application : the billing system .
“ There are services on AWS to support virtually any use case you might have ,” said Hamilton . “ Our migration to AWS is a true success story .” p
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