Public school administrators dream of migrating to cloud; but slow approvals and budget short-falls mean those dreams are often unfulfilled. Students and teachers endure as they deal with snail-pace speeds and antiquated user interfaces. But the suffering is over at Oregon’s Portland Public Schools thanks to its surprisingly successful cloud computing migration journey.

“We went from idea to completion in four months,” said Dr. Travis Paakki (pictured), director of applications development and systems integration at Portland Public Schools.

Paakki spoke with spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Imagine event in Seattle, Washington. They discussed the Portland Public Schools’ cloud migration journey (see the full interview with transcript here).

No-fear cloud migration on a budget

Portland Public Schools manages administration using Oracle’s PeopleSoft Campus Solutions software. Before migration to AWS, it ran on outdated on-premises infrastructure fast approaching end-of-life. Performance was so horrible that page refresh times were often 10 seconds, and users were so frustrated with lack of response to complaints that they’d given up reporting.

“It was really bad,” Paakki said. “We were out of time.”

Replacing existing hardware came with a half-million-dollar price tag, and finding employees with the required skillset to manage it had become an issue.  To increase the pressure, “my boss came around the corner and said, ‘By the way, we have a 10% budget cut,’” Paakki added.

Leap into cloud has soft landing

Migrating wholesale to the AWS cloud was not the most obvious or the recommended solution for Portland Public Schools problem. But sometimes taking a risk is the only option.

“It didn’t seem like the viable thing to do, and yes we were advised not to try the [enterprise resource planning] first,” Paakki said. “But that was our use case, and if we were going to do it, we were going to do it big. So we did.”

The gamble paid off. Just four months after deciding to adopt cloud, the school’s system was migrated over and running smoothly.

“Nobody expected it to work, and certainly nobody expected it to work that fast,” Paakki stated.

Thanks to AWS’ virtual infrastructure, Portland Public Schools were able to run its existing software in tandem, on-prem and in the cloud. “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,” Paakki stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Imagine event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE