Mike Burke, Velocity Enablement Manager at Farm Credit Canada presented at the Canadian Executive Cloud & DevOps Summit on June 9, 2017 in Toronto, ON hosted by TriNimbus Technologies.

1. Virtual Desktops on AWS
Mike Burke, Farm Credit Canada

2. Farm Credit Canada
• FCC is a self sustaining Crown Corporation with a $31 billion
portfolio
• Head office in Regina, Saskatchewan
• The working environment is awesome

3. A Little About Me
• Proud father of two amazing children, ages 9 & 5
• Love to travel
• Technology is a passion and honestly a lot of fun

4. The Cloud Journey
• FCC’s first big splash into Cloud was in the Fall of 2015, when we
successfully implemented Office 365
• I was a member of the project team as a network resource, but I
had a front row seat and I liked what I saw
• The move to Office 365 wasn’t simple or flawless, but the project
was a success and 18 months later, we’re really happy as an
organization with our Productivity & CollaborationTools

5. The Side Benefit
• During the Office 365 project, we implemented Microsoft Azure
and used some IaaS processing power for Authentication
services
• Azure was a hit around the office, and we ended up using it for a
few other workloads along the way, including SAP HANA
• Azure gave us a second data center option – it was no longer “On
premise or bust”

6. So Why AWS?
• We had some momentum in Azure, so the need to bring on a
second Cloud provider wasn’t clear to everyone
• As we began to research AWS, Oracle, Google…it was evident
that not every Cloud provider had every service offering
• AWS’ serverless computing offering, AI, and Aurora Database
were all attractive, but there was a business problem that
showed up on our doorstep that gave us a reason to do a proof of
concept

7. Our Business Problem
• A data center migration was going on at FCC and we didn’t have
enough hardware for our 100+VDI workload
• To resolve this, we were looking at capital costs to purchase
hardware at our new on premise data center. There were
also migration costs for the existingVDI’s and an impact to
the migration schedule
• Azure didn’t have a “VDI as a Service” offering at the time
• Research was done into other providers, and Amazon
Workspaces emerged as an option

8. An Amazon what?
• Workspaces are a “Virtual Desktop as a Service” offering on AWS
• Your Desktop is available Anywhere, Anytime, on any
Device and Fully Managed by Amazon
• Three Different Sizes of Desktop
• Value – 2 CPU, 2 GB Memory, 10 GB storage ($25/mo)
• Standard - 2 CPU, 4 GB Memory, 50 GB storage
($35/mo)
• Performance - 2 CPU, 7.5 GB Memory, 100 GB storage
($60/mo)

9. So Let’sTry It Out!
• We testedVDI’s for our AMS provider, our Quality Assurance lab,
and for testing software packages
• Each group’s software was tested and we found that Workspaces
worked great for our AMS provider and our QA lab

10. HowTo Proceed
• There were some major things that could get in the way:
• Security
• Procurement

11. The Security Conversation
• Data Loss Prevention and Ransomware are scary events
regardless of where your data is hosted
• Our Enterprise Security team was comfortable with the security
Amazon provided, and helped in the conversations with Legal &
Risk on changing the conversation from:
• Old message “The Cloud is scary, security is an issue”
• New Message “The Cloud is Secure, but you need to know
how to use it. Security is a shared responsibility”.

12. Procurement
• There were two hurdles with procurement:
• We had just signed a major outsourcing contract for data
center services
• We already had Azure
• There’s nothing wrong with a little competition for Azure

13. Enter –TriNimbus!
• TriNimbus was the successful candidate of a procurement
process to be our AWS partner for this project
• A lot of the initial tasks involved working with our network
provider, andTriNimbus did a great job moving the
conversations forward on things like:
• Site to SiteVPN’s
• New Subnets
• Network zoning

14. Project Start!
• The POC’s were done, the network was connected viaVPN, and
our friends atTriNimbus got to work
• We had two months to finish this project andTriNimbus and FCC
really worked together to meet our goal
• QA and AMS machines went well, but the project did have a few
bumps in the road

15. A Few Wrinkles
• AWSWorkspaces didn’t work so well for our software
deployment team
• We use SCCM to push software and test patches, and even
though Workspaces are SCCM compatible, Workspaces run
Windows 2012 orWindows 2016 at their core, and are not a pure
Windows 7 or Windows 10 Operating System
• For our software lab, we ended up deploying EC2 machines

16. Automation
• Our environment team uses Jenkins as a continuous delivery tool
• Standard jobs were created in Jenkins so our QA team could
provision a “standard” Workspace with the click of a button
• Provisioning takes less 20 minutes from button click to a user
logging in to their Workspace

17. The Future
• Virtual Desktops were a great initial workload to ease into AWS
• We got to set up the network, try some of the tools, and try the
service without putting a workload on there that could impact
our ability to do our core business
• This has set us up for success and more innovation

18. Next!
• Since the end of theVDI project, we’ve begun moving our
accounts from aVPN connection to a 100 MBPS Amazon Direct
Connection from our data center to AWS
• Once that’s complete, we’re going to tackle our test
environments for Oracle, SAP, and our Custom banking
applications

19. What to LeaveYouWith
• Using AWS is a Strategic Shift
• We are moving away from finite hardware capacity,
hardware refresh cycles, and hardware scalability of 2-3
months
• We are moving away from capital spend on hardware
• We are moving towards
• Improved velocity for IT and our business partners

20. Questions?
Mike.burke@fcc.ca