Slalom was already using a cloud provider for its SharePoint 2010 farm but wanted to diversify its environment. After considering other cloud providers, the company chose Amazon Web Services (AWS). “The decision was based on functionality and flexibility — and we landed on AWS,” says Development Manager, Michael “Ski” Cierkowski. “We have assets on our other cloud site and on premises. AWS was the only cloud provider to enable multiple persistent site-to-site connections so we can maintain those connections.”

Using the SharePoint Reference Architecture Whitepaper as a basis for the deployment, Cierkowski migrated about 1,300 SharePoint sites over the course of six months while he worked on other projects. He provisioned Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) in the US West (Oregon) Region to take advantage of VPN technology. “We needed to be able to have two site-to-site VPN connections in order to connect to our existing cloud environment and our on-premises network,” Cierkowski explains. “Amazon VPC made it possible.”

The SharePoint farm runs on about five Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and includes two web front servers, an application server, an Office Web Applications server and SQL Server. The servers are isolated into four different subnets to have full control of security and the traffic that flows between each subnet. Slalom used the SharePoint 2010 architecture diagram published by AWS as the basis for the design.

Slalom runs SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise on AWS using standard, 64-bit Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Microsoft Windows 2012. Slalom has four web applications running on its SharePoint solutions. The web applications were developed using Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 and JavaScript.

Slalom’s core collaboration solution, known as Slalom One, consists of three tightly integrated applications including a space for all team sites, Slalom’s Intranet, Human Resources, IT and other supporting sites; a space for personal sites; and a business space that the company’s leadership uses to access reports and dashboards. Figure 1 demonstrates the SharePoint 2013 solution on the AWS Cloud.