Sector(s)
In support of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), a bureau within the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), digital services mission, the Nationwide IT Services (NIS) contracting team partnered closely with USGS to deliver continuous operations and maintenance (O&M) support for the Drupal content management system and related applications hosted within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Web Reengineering Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
The team provided 24x7x365 support for mission-critical digital services, executing regular agile maintenance and enhancement sprints to identify and remediate bugs and defects, resolve system issues, and implement platform improvements. This approach ensured a highly available, secure, and scalable platform while supporting the evolving requirements of USGS Digital Programs.
About the project
Goals:
This effort focused on modernizing the Drupal platform to support long-term sustainability and future enhancements, improving overall platform stability and performance, and reducing infrastructure costs while maintaining a secure and compliant environment.
Requirements:
The scope of work required a comprehensive redevelopment of the platform from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 while maintaining uninterrupted operations for mission-critical, public-facing services. Zero downtime was essential, with the site required to remain fully functional, secure, and accessible at all times throughout the modernization effort.
The effort also included supporting ongoing and future Drupal core and contributed module upgrades, remediating deprecated functionality, and refactoring custom code to align with modern Drupal architecture standards.
Additionally, the work involved operating, securing, and optimizing the AWS environment through continuous monitoring, patching, performance tuning, and cost optimization.
To meet these requirements, the team implemented high-availability and fault-tolerant architectures, proactive monitoring and incident response procedures, robust backup and recovery capabilities, and alignment with federal security and operational standards.
Outcome:
The platform was successfully redeveloped from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 and later upgraded to Drupal 10 without any disruption to mission-critical services. These upgrades improved system performance, strengthened security, and enhanced long-term maintainability while ensuring continuous availability for public-facing users.
The modernization significantly reduced security vulnerabilities and recurring defects, resulting in measurable cost and labor savings while maintaining full availability and stabilizing annual operating costs despite major version upgrades.
Why Drupal was chosen
The customer operated an existing Drupal implementation and initiated a platform modernization effort to transition to the latest supported version. Drupal was selected for its enterprise-grade security model, extensibility, accessibility compliance, and proven suitability for large-scale government platforms requiring long-term support and modular growth.
This modernization approach enabled the remediation of legacy code and architectural constraints while strengthening security, improving performance and reliability, and ensuring compliance with federal requirements. It also established a sustainable foundation capable of supporting evolving mission needs and long-term platform operations, including future zero-downtime upgrade paths.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
This approach was chosen for its scalability and flexibility, while leveraging existing team knowledge to support efficient development and long-term maintenance. OpenSearch replaced the previous Solr-based search to improve search performance, relevance, and result placement.
