University of Arkansas at Little Rock SaaS Migration Debrief - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

University of Arkansas at Little Rock SaaS Migration Debrief

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Project SaaS : Goals and Vision

As part of a special program Blackboard has in place with the Board of Trustees of the University of Arkansas, many participating institutions, including UALR, had the opportunity to switch Learn deployment models from Self-Hosting or Managed Hosting to Software-as-a-Service or SaaS. At this time about half of the UA campuses have migrated to Learn SaaS.

Enhanced Quality

Fixes & maintenance more quickly

Rapid Innovation

Enhancements & features more quickly

Improved Experience

Zero downtime updates

Milestone to Analytics for Learn

SaaS migration required in order to leverage A4L

Easier Change Management

Smaller, continuous delivery updates

Gateway to ULTRA

Option to leverage newer interface in future

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Summary of Technical Events

Date Issue Impact 10 JAN Storage throughput not sized properly. Performance degradation 12 JAN Both storage throughput and database services undersized. 2 hours of severe application slowness. 17 JAN NAT Gateway – AWS environmental service - failure impacted all SaaS customers. 1 hour 40 min outage. 06 FEB Database lock System outage 12 FEB Database Lock System outage 13 Feb Failed version upgrade 2 hour system outage. Next upgrade attempt successful 28 Feb AWS East outage Full system outage, 4 hours.

Cumulative Effect January 99.507168% (220 Mins / 3.66 Hours) February 98.405258% (643 Mins / 10.71 Hours)

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Other Challenges that Limited Faculty & Student Success

Speed of restores during SaaS migration SIS feed run on 3 Jan created shells that caused the failure of restores. We had to pause restores until we could delete the course shells that were created by the feed. Historic courses back to the beginning

• f 2015 were restoring at a slow rate.

Professor’s use the old courses to pull content in the current term. Process completed by Blackboard Learn Ops to speed up the remaining restores 21- 22 Jan. Assessment Issue Reported 28 Jan and escalated to product development immediately. Resolved on 13 Feb with the deployment

• f release 3100.9 (2) to production

SIS Integration Enrollments and Drops were not being processed properly. Students confused by seeing courses in which they were no longer enrolled. Blackboard worked with UALR team to manually help them process drops directly in the database. Fully resolved the issue after approximately 3 weeks Malformed Course ID’s after restores of merged courses Identified problem on 27 Dec. Affected approximately 120 courses in the current term. Blackboard worked with UALR to manually correct the courses. Fully resolved on 7 Jan, before the start of the spring term.

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Continuous Improvement & Risk Mitigation

Four version upgrade deployments in two months. Three completed with no issue. Daily email summary of project with all support ticket status. Daily check-in call with full UALR project team. Upgraded our NAT Gateway services with AWS for a more robust solution. Resolved 75 support tickets since 01 Jan. Currently two

• pen severity 3 tickets.

73% of tickets closed in under 7 days. Ongoing work to complete a comparison report of prior Managed Hosting environment to new SaaS Environment. Revised storage and database sizing guidelines for future

• perations.

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Questions and Feedback

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• bservation.
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