ENVI Now A Reason

To Be Jealous For Many

L3Harris Optimizes Proprietary Geospatial Application On Amazon AppStream 2.0

 Migration  Modernization  Serverless

Summary

Harris Geospatial develops products for the visualization, analysis, and management of geospatial imagery and scientific data with customers including the US Defense Department.

Providing training to users is vital to their business, but finding a way to efficiently offer training via training days, seminars or webinars proved to be a tremendous drain on resources. L3Harris came to Cloud303 seeking to optimize and modernize how they provided training for ENVI to both their customers and their employees. Prior to the engagement, Harris provided training for their ENVI software, they were paying exorbitant fees to host this application in a web browser on a managed platform. They needed to integrate their software into their Learning Management System (LMS) but were spending $1000s per day whether the software was used or not.

Cloud303 proposed and implemented ENVI running in AWS AppStream 2.0 in order to provide a single-tenant, fully scalable and dynamically provisioned environment for end users going through the training process. Cloud303 also integrated the AppStream implementation of ENVI with L3Harris’s LMS using Serverless APIs on AWS. The final product was a seamless training experience that allowed users to finish a lesson in L3Harris’s LMS, immediately put their new knowledge to practical use in ENVI right in the browser and then go back to the LMS to move onto the next lesson. This was a more dynamic and flexible solution and was achieved at a fraction of the cost of their previous solution.

             

Melissa Jackson: Chief Software Engineer

Industries:
Defense Contractor
Regions: 
NALADEMEAAPAC
AWS Segment: 
EnterpriseSMB

The Challenge

Harris Geospatial was using a platform called Frame in order to integrate practical ENVI experience with lesson-based training. Frame was charging Harris Geospatial monthly for licensing whether their software was used or not, and this was costing Harris Geospatial several thousand dollars every day, as they needed to be prepared for the maximum possible capacity rather than paying as-needed. Pain points included:

• Scaling limits

• Set monthly costs

• Deployment time

• Lack of integration

 

Ryan Doyle: Account Manager    AWS

Why L3Harris Law Chose Cloud303?

Cloud303 proposed a solution involving AppStream and Serverless Application Model (SAM) APIs and nothing like that had been proposed by any other partner.

Cloud303's Solution

Cloud303 helped L3Harris migrate training/demo for their in-house built imagery data analysis software, ENVI, from Frame to AWS AppStream 2.0. The implementation was further integrated with their Learning Management System by using Serverless Application Model on AWS to expose APIs.  

Cloud303 began by presenting a proof of concept to Harris to run ENVI on AppStream. ENVI has heavy computing and throughput requirements so a high powered Graphics G4dn instance type was used. Persistent storage with great performance was also required for ENVI hence FSx for Windows was leveraged with appropriate Group Policies to map the appropriate folders.

Serverless Application Model was leveraged to build an API backend in order to integrate with L3Harris’ Learning Management System. This API backend along with AWS AppStream 2.0, allows the LMS to provide a live demo/lab after completion of theoretical material. The API backend provides capabilities such as specifying desired number of nodes to provide AppStream 2.0 streaming resources for a session, creating AppStream 2.0 users, streaming URLs, among others.

In addition, Cloud303 created a calendaring system for the training program, allowing Harris to easily send invites, play demos, and send streaming URLs at scheduled times to everyone participating in the training.

Results/Benefits

As a result of migrating to AWS, Harris can now easily schedule and run training for their ENVI software for less than $1000/month compared to the $1000+ they were spending daily while running their training on Frame. Cloud303 was also able to duplicate the calendaring system for a number of other clients who required AppStream orchestration.