Technology Department

[Blair S - 1358329]

 

Technology Department
A lot has happened behind the scenes with the move to new IT infrastructure and the development and initial implementation of new systems.

 

Move to AWS
The transfer of all VATPAC web services is now complete and are all now hosted on AWS. This has led to a reduction in costs by more than 50% as well as improvements in performance and reliability in services. While there were some initial teething issues upon migration, all of these are now resolved and all services are operating correctly.

 

Legacy files
Legacy files that were once hosted, on the old services have been made available to the relevant members of staff for their use in the future.

 

Unified Password management
The implementation of a password management system for VATPAC staff is being tested and will soon be deployed to all staff. This allows for efficient password sharing with access control to passwords. All passwords are hosted on VATPAC services and are protected from external access. This application is yet another tool to improve the security of VATPAC services.

 

VATSIM Data API
The VATSIM data api technology has come a long way and we can now use the data provided by VATSIM and build upon it to provide improved services. With this in mind the IT department has been spending significant amounts of time developing some data analysis technologies to improve and update the data in various VATPAC services. For example, soon we will have access to historical as well as live data from the feed to replace the old, inefficient IPS data collection system, this will allow for efficient queries of data that can then be used in statistics, such as top weekly pilot/controller, etc. This will also help in the redevelopment of VATPAX.

 

VATPAX
Steven Brown, the original developer of VATPAX, has reached out and will now be redeveloping VATPAX as a external service to VATPAC whereby it will be available to other divisions as well. The IT team will be working closely with him in any support he will need and provide access to various APIs from within VATPAC, such as the new data API.