“Scaleway’s infrastructure was made available to us in just a few hours” - how Région Guadeloupe moved to the cloud in 10 days

“Scaleway’s infrastructure was made available to us in just a few hours” - how Région Guadeloupe moved to the cloud in 10 days Deploy • James Martin • 13/02/24 • 5 min read

Following an attack on its on-premise infrastructures at the end of 2022, the Region of Guadeloupe decided to migrate to the cloud... but as a matter of urgency! Henri Ferreira, General Management Project Lead in charge of Cyber Defense and Territorial Intelligence, explains how he was able to get his first services back up and running within ten days, thanks to the proximity and innovation of Scaleway's teams.

_FYI: Albeit a Caribbean archipelago, Guadeloupe is a "département d'outre mer", which means it's essentially considered part of France. _

What led you to migrate to Scaleway?

Initially, we were 100% on premise. We had already been working with Scaleway for six to eight months, but on a small scale, on lab projects and R&D aspects. Then on November 21, 2022, we were cyber-attacked. The next day, we decided within hours that we would switch to the cloud . Otherwise, we would have made the transition (to the cloud) much more slowly.

We didn't know the full extent of the attack. So we decided to start with something completely new, and to move the infrastructure up to the cloud as quickly as possible. Our contacts at Scaleway immediately reassured us, and provided us with assistance from the outset to support our migration.

Region Guadeloupe has two main activities: designing and managing infrastructure - high schools, roads, etc.; and managing subsidies and grants (for businesses, the arts, associations, etc.). Our IT system helps us manage all this, as well as all support functions (payroll, vacations, etc.). And let's not forget the administrative and political aspects: our system also enables elected representatives to vote for a given project, and to post their decisions (by-laws, articles of law...) for the benefit of citizens.

Our platform welcomes 25,000 high school students and vocational trainees every day. Without IT, the students don't eat at the canteen, access badges don't work...

After the attack, we needed to recreate everything: set up the infrastructure, with Scaleway - rent Elastic Metal servers, Instances, very quickly - so that then the publishers of the fifteen or so software applications we use could reinstall them.

All the private cloud infrastructure was available from Scaleway within a few hours; and within ten days, we were able to put our financial system back together, i.e. we were able to pay our suppliers, salaries, subsidies etc., in a very short time . Then the last service was set up three months later, in February 2023: the grants service, where future baccalaureate holders apply to study in Quebec, for example.

Today, all our infrastructure goes through Scaleway: we no longer have anything on premise. We use 83 Bare Metal servers, 90 Instances - including GPUs for AI - load balancers, Redis... it's easier to say what we don't use at Scaleway!

How do Scaleway solutions help you overcome your key challenges?

We're with Scaleway for the long haul. We had to urgently rebuild the services - the plan was called "Resurrection" - but also make them better and more resilient. So now we’re hosted in two AZs (availability zones) - par-1 and par-2 - with high availability . We couldn’t have done this sort of thing without the cloud.

We have 150 services deployed today , and we're continuing to deploy more. Scaleway brings us something phenomenal: we don't have to worry about 'silly' [physical] things like air conditioning, floods, cyclones, electrical instability, server obsolescence... It relieves us of all the lower layers of management, and in the end it's a win-win situation, because it costs less than before.

We benefit from phenomenal flexibility . I've just received a request for additional servers from the IT director. In the former ‘legacy’ mode, we would have had to issue a call for tenders, starting a long cycle that could last two months. Whereas with the cloud, we can have the servers ready within one hour. And maybe that director will only need those servers for an hour, which is also fine.

This allows us to respond flexibly to the demands of Guadeloupe's citizens, simplifying their lives and those of our regional council staff . In particular, by relieving the latter of rather tedious tasks, they can spend more time with citizens.

Likewise, we don't use AI to reduce our workforce! Today, because it's so easy to ask a question on a website, that's generated a lot more grant applications than before. AI helps us to verify these requests , by automating, allowing us to validate the veracity of official documents, making sure we only keep personal documents for 2 years (RGPD) and so on.

Finally, we're fortunate that Scaleway has a number of AI customers, and this allows us to benefit from technological advantages that we wouldn't have had as quickly under the old system.

Why did you not choose other cloud providers?

We submitted our request to all the French cloud providers (CSPs), and Scaleway came out on top, both on the legacy side (bare metal) and on advanced features (Instances, Kubernetes, load balancers, etc.) .

When you migrate, many publishers say, for example, "no, I only support ESXI, I don't support Kubernetes." So we had to take this into account with regard to our legacy system.

Scaleway offers us the widest range of technological responses, from the simplest to the most complex, enabling us to adapt to all our publishers' needs.

What's more, the way the Scaleway system is made is the easiest for us to support. It took three of us to set up the infrastructure. Guadeloupe is the smallest region in France, with a low number of IT specialists in relation to its population. There are 400,000 of us, but like the others, we need an HR system, a financial system...

We need flexibility, and Scaleway was able to put itself at our level of understanding to be able to move forward very quickly. We needed this proximity, which we wouldn't have had with another hyperscaler .

So Elastic Metal replaced your on premise servers. Why did you also need Instances et Compute products?

We had to conform with NIS V2 , a cybersecurity directive with which all local authorities will have to comply by July 2024. It's very…