618 Shared Infrastructure


The '618 Shared Infrastructure' is a set of almost 60 servers shared by several dozen application teams, both internal and external to UW-IT. This set of servers collectively has an end of life of June 30, 2025. This infrastructure is funded via a unique arrangement pooling funds across these team's budgets. Production, development, and evaluation environments are included for most of the technical services provided. Some limited developer assistance is also included.

Providers

Multiple UW-IT teams are involved in providing the services including:

Services included

Technical services generally provided to all customers '618 Shared Infrastructure' include:

Some customers of '618 Shared Infrastructure' also receive:

Customer responsibilities

Customers within this environment are generally responsible for:

Because these servers are shared by dozens of applications, a significant issue can be caused by one application that affects all the other customers and applications. For this reason, test and evaluation environments are provided to help customers to be great partners who have tested and evaluated new application deployments before deploying them into production. Likewise, for the greater good, UW-IT is empowered to put in place limits on any application which has known problems, to limit its impact on other applications sharing this solution. If UW-IT needs to take this action, it will seek to do the least harm and maximize the greatest possible value within reason.

Technical limitations and exit strategy

Since these servers are shared by dozens of applications, changes to the existing technical architecture are not viable due to the sheer magnitude of coordination and potential for negative impact. For this reason, the Windows Server OS version, TLS version, encryption ciphers supported, SQL server version, and many other technology details must remain constant. The servers in the '618 Shared Infrastructure' will be turned off as of June 30, 2025. All customers of this shared solution must develop and execute a migration plan no later than June 21, 2025. Some UW-IT teams who are customers of this solution have begun exploring migration of SQL Server databases to Azure SQL Managed Instances. Some customers are considering migration of VM-based IIS web sites to Azure App services (eliminating the need for web servers). We expect most Azure DevOps server customers will move their code repository to Azure DevOps (online) or Github. We expect that file service customers needing SSH access will shift from the existing 3rd party Tectia solution to the native Windows Server OpenSSH solution available with Windows Server 2019 or newer.