NBN Co has revealed further details of what is shaping as a large-scale migration of IT workloads into AWS, with a potential budget running into the tens of millions of dollars.
iTnews reported earlier this month that the network operator is embarking on a project to push a greater percentage of its application workloads into public cloud, seemingly in a bid to reduce its operating costs.
Now, the company has outlined some of its architectural plans for AWS, notably its intention to create a service catalogue for consumption of infrastructure by different internal business units.
It plans to take advantage of AWS CloudFormation and Ansible automation software to orchestrate the various pieces of AWS infrastructure that a particular workload needs to run.
The combination of Ansible and CloudFormation is seen as a way to address shortcomings in relying solely on CloudFormation for orchestration.
NBN Co plans to build a series of “complex” and “world class” cloud services templates that can be accessed by business users through the service catalogue.
Though these are to be primarily for AWS, the network builder appears not to have ruled out running in a multi-cloud environment.
In addition to establishing the cloud service foundations, it also hopes to create a series of “standards” that it says will be “essential for optimum service performance, operations and costs”.
It is continuing to expand the team set to work on the AWS migration project, now recruiting a cloud service automation engineer, whose role – among other things – includes “providing consultancy to the other [internal] NBN teams with budgets up to $100 million”.
iTnews sought to clarify whether that figure was a total forecast annual spend for cloud infrastructure, or the total IT budget of internal teams that are being earmarked to make use of the AWS environment.
An NBN Co spokesperson did not return requests for comment.
