 From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Imagine. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine Education event. It's the second year of the event. It's about 800 people. We were here last year too, I think it was 400 people. So it's growing quickly like everything at AWS. It's all about education. That's public school, private school, university, K through 12, community college, everything you can imagine. It's a really comprehensive area that Amazon's focusing on. We're excited to have our next guest really from the school district. We have not even from the school district. He's Travis Pocky, the senior director information services for Portland Public School. I'm a proud graduate of the Portland Public School system. So Travis, great to see you. Great to see you. Absolutely. So first off, impressions of the show. You said you weren't able to make it this year. Got to sit in the keynotes this morning with Teresa and Andrew a couple of sessions. Just kind of your impressions of being at an event like this. You know, it's really fantastic to have an event that ties together AWS and education in that education space. It's a great resource for people that are using AWS within the education community. So this has been fantastic. Yeah, it's good because education is not necessarily touted as the most progressive industry. Exactly. So the fact that they made this commitment is pretty significant. Exactly. So you've had a recent significant event within your IT journey and cloud journey. I wonder if you can tell us what you guys just recently completed. Sure. So we recently migrated our PeopleSoft application from our on-prem data center to the cloud. And one of the real challenges we had was there was no extra money to do this work. So we had kind of come across the idea that the hardware was end of life. It was going to be about a $500,000 replacement cost. In addition to that, we had several on-staff positions that really weren't fillable. It had become such a niche skill set that we really had a lot of trouble trying to get those positions filled. So in addition to that, my boss came around the corner and said, by the way, we have a 10% budget cut. So how do we resolve all of that, plus address this really big problem with the system not even team? And time was ticking, right? Your hardware time was ticking. It was really bad. I mean, we were at a point where we were getting 9, 10 second page refresh times. And the user community had kind of gotten to the point where our numbers for satisfaction looked really good because we didn't get complaints because the user community had gotten so disillusioned by making those complaints and not getting any results that they just gave up on complaining. So we were out of time. You're out of time. So typically a cloud migration of an old application is not necessarily the easiest place to get started on your cloud journey. Did you already have some experience with cloud or was this really kind of your first foray into this area? I had worked at a startup a few years before and we did our entire infrastructure on AWS. So that was my introduction to AWS and AWS services. And there was a lot of people that were looking away from that as a solution. It didn't seem like the viable thing to do. And yes, we were advised not to try the ERP first. But that was our use case. And if we were going to do it, we were going to do it big. So we did. So you brought in some consultants, I would assume that helped out? Or did you guys do it all in-house? Actually, what we did was we looked for a managed service provider. So our use case in that we had many positions that we couldn't get filled was that we needed the virtual infrastructure. But we also needed the people to do some of those tasks for us. So that was our partnership, was we worked with a managed solution provider called High Street. And High Street really helped us with that process. And so how long did it take? When did you get it complete? We went from idea to completion in four months. Idea to completion in four months? Yes. Wow. And that was unprecedented. Certainly, nobody expected it to work that fast. And when you do these migrations, you understand that it is going to be a high stress situation. And one of the major things that AWS did for us was it gave us that virtual infrastructure so that we could run in tandem. We could actually continue to run completely as we were in production and run the new systems and run all the tests. So we were able to get cut over in no time with almost no stress. I think we had one problem when we went live. So then what did your boss say when he came around the corner? Good job, Travis. Good job, yes. OK, great. So there's a whole bunch of components to cloud that have a lot of benefits. Security, like we said, it's actually a lot more secure than a lot of times your own stuff. There's cost savings, and there's infrastructure leverage that you can get. But more importantly, and we've heard a lot of the stories here, is it opens up an opportunity for innovation. It opens up an opportunity to try any things, to move fast. So I wonder if is that kind of an unintended consequence of this process, or do you think you've kind of sold the in-house people that, look, it worked. We did it fast. I assume it's close to budget or close to timing. And now I sit here for two days and listen to all the crazy, cool, innovative things that people are doing with Alexa, et cetera. So where do you go next? One of the unintended consequences of it was granting us a DR process. So we had a very basic DR system in place. And by moving to the cloud, not only did we make it insulated from any events that might happen in our primary building, which is also our primary data center, but it gave us that ability to fail over and persist through a significant event. One of the other things that's done, though, is it's given our developers access to tools that they just didn't have access to before. So one of the places where we're experimenting pretty heavily in is Lambda. So serverless functions trying to get to the point where we can enhance our existing software by making calls out to our Amazon VPC and data that exists out there without having to make hardcore modifications to the internal systems. We were actually able to do a demo of that within 30 minutes. So that normal process would take about two weeks to write. So is there new stuff on the horizon? Are you just like kid in a candy store? Like now, look at the power of flexibility that we have that we just didn't have kind of strapped to our old data center before. Absolutely. Right now, I think the biggest struggle is trying to figure out what we tackle next. There's a lot of things out there. We have a data interchange platform. It would be great if we could replace that with AWS functions and Lambda calls. I think that's probably going to be our next biggest tackle is that. After that, we'd really like to start rewriting some of our in-house written apps completely in AWS services. And I think that's going to be a huge win for the district. OK. And then, do you guys purchase a lot of these other software applications? There's a lot of companies here that have blackboards, just the one that always comes into my head. Not to pick on them specifically, but do you guys have a ton of those types of applications and installed as well? We definitely tend to leverage bot first. But some of them, like School Mint, have been fantastic partners for us. And that's one of the ones that we've really leaned on because of how intricate some of our policies are. School Mint has the capability to implement that for us. Right, right. Well, it sounds pretty exciting. But the question is, when does the grand opening of the grant? That's what I want to know. I need the date. So afterwards, you can send me the date. That's where I went to high school. They just finished a beautiful remodel. I don't even know how many millions and millions of dollars that were spent, but a lot. Yes, a lot. All right, well Travis, congratulations. Four month ERP move. I don't know, throw that out as a challenge. Maybe somebody else can beat it. I don't know, that's pretty good. Absolutely. All right, thanks for stopping by. Thank you. All right, East Travis, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS Imagine Education in downtown Seattle. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.