The new AWS moderate cloud environment gives the small Strategic Analysis Cloud Team at NREL an easy way to manage its MHKDR, OpenEI, and geothermal energy websites. “Using AWS, I can manage everything from one API, including looking at performance, monitoring costs, and creating new virtual servers,” says Webber. His team can also use that API to efficiently manage the environment. “We have the agility

to rapidly respond to our customers by using AWS,” says Weers. For example, NREL can quickly launch new web servers to support new websites for internal analysis, prototyping, or to meet urgent external demand. “We can launch new websites in a day, as opposed to the several weeks it would take to procure storage and purchase and install hardware. We can accomplish it all with a few API calls.”

NREL also has the scalability it needs to quickly launch virtual machines as more researchers share data on the organization’s websites. “Our MHKDR and geothermal data repositories are built to share data, and with AWS we can support that in a very scalable way,” says Weers. “By being on AWS, we can have all these open data connections available, so anyone can come to our websites and we can be scalable enough to respond to that sort of wide-open demand. If 10 more websites connect to the MHKDR tomorrow, we can very easily accommodate them.”

The organization also saves money by using AWS. “Our data curators have to work less,” Weers says. “The previous environment was more traditional, with in-house virtual machines, and the curators had to push a lot more buttons to launch and manage those machines. Because they no longer have to do that, we’re seeing up to 30 percent cost savings related to that task.”

By using AWS to manage the MHKDR environment, NREL can concentrate more on data quality. “Using AWS, we worry less and spend less time and money on infrastructure. As a result, we can focus more of our attention on content and data quality and on making sure our renewable energy data is discoverable by researchers around the world. Our developers spend less time coding connections and security protocols and more time coding great data and data curation measures,” says Weers.

AWS security controls coupled with the controls implemented by NREL make the ATO environment as secure as internal laboratory servers. “Security is paramount for us. The Department of Energy signed off on this cloud environment because they were comfortable with our security protocols,” says Webber. “Our cybersecurity group helped us manage each of the 400-plus ATO controls we needed, and so many of those controls were already handled by AWS through Amazon’s own ATO accreditation. That really helped us accelerate the adoption of this cloud.”

With its new moderate cloud up and running, NREL has migrated additional web applications to the environment and will continue to do so. “Now that we have this environment, I’m getting several calls a week from researchers and potential collaborators interested in taking advantage of it,” says Weers. “We’re going to see exponential growth because of this new environment, and AWS is a big reason for that.”