Medusa AWS Project Presentation

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In February 2019 the UIUC Library went live with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) implementation of the Medusa Collection Registry (medusa.library.illinois.edu), Illinois Data Bank (databank.illinois.edu), and the Library’s Digital Collections (digital.library.illinois.edu). This effort moved over 130 terabytes of digital collections to S3 storage, and implemented the supported web applications using Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), serverless (AWS Fargate), and container (Elastic Container Service – ECS) technologies. This move provided greater durability and reliability of data that are increasingly central to the Library’s mission of curating and preserving information. The presentation will discuss the motivation to move to AWS, the architecture of the AWS services used, and the challenges overcome by the Library team. Also discussed will be the changes made to the medusa, databank, and digital collection web apps to adapt to the AWS ecosystem. AWS serverless technologies, Fargate and ECS, to manage images in the web interfaces are also presented.