Building on the Pillars: How AWS Foundations Keep the Forest Service Cloud Standing Strong
Written by Hanna Shemke, Marketing Director & Proposal Coordinator
When you build a house, the foundation determines whether it will last. But even the strongest foundation won’t hold without pillars to support it. The same is true in the cloud.
In our first story, we shared how Cynerge and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) built the foundation for cloud migration — moving from 182 data centers to a secure, scalable AWS environment. But that foundation wasn’t just technology. It was the six AWS Well-Architected Pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability.
These pillars aren’t theory. They’re alive in the way Cynerge designed landing zones, migrated apps, and taught developers new ways of working. They’re the reason Forest Service systems are not only surviving in the cloud — they’re thriving.
Operational Excellence: Smarter Ways of Working
For USFS developers, the old way of working was painful. Deployments meant uploading zip files by hand and waiting for approvals that could stretch into weeks. One missed step could derail everything.
When Cynerge introduced CI/CD pipelines and modern branching strategies, the shift was immediate. Code could be tested automatically, reviewed quickly, and pushed into production with confidence.
Luther Jolliff, one of Cynerge’s Solutions Architects, still remembers the shock of seeing changes go live so quickly. “All developers have to do is merge into dev and everyone can see it reflected within 15 minutes. That used to take weeks.”
Operational excellence wasn’t just about speed. It was about creating repeatable, automated processes that reduced risk and let developers focus on building features instead of fighting fires. It was about teaching teams GitHub workflows and embedding governance into every pipeline. And it turned IT from a bottleneck into an accelerator.
Security: Trust Built In
When you’re tracking aircraft during a wildfire, trust is non-negotiable. If systems aren’t secure, lives are at risk.
From the beginning, Cynerge embedded zero-trust security into the Forest Service’s AWS environment. Each application was isolated in its own account, data was encrypted in transit and at rest, and AWS Config continuously monitored for drift. Visibility tools like WAF, CloudTrail, Splunk, and DataDog provided real-time insights.
At one point, security concerns even forced a change in strategy. Luther recalled that “We embraced containers because the security team needed proof that the environment was locked down.”
Instead of security being a roadblock, Cynerge made it part of the design. That gave leadership confidence that every app migrated would be compliant and protected from day one.
Reliability: No Room for Downtime
Wildfires don’t wait — and neither can the systems that support them. For Cynerge, reliability meant designing for failure and recovery from the start.
Applications were spread across multiple availability zones to withstand outages. Automated failover and hot redundancy were built in. But sometimes the best lessons came from mistakes.
Luther laughed when he thought back to one of them, stating that “Terraform once blew up an entire (Non-Production) environment on me. Wiped it out. But because resilience was designed in, we rebuilt quickly — and added the guardrails we needed.”
Those early failures became controlled burns — painful in the moment, but essential to strengthening the architecture. Over time, the environment became more robust, with reliability practices baked into every deployment.
Performance Efficiency: Speed at Scale
Performance isn’t just about raw speed. It’s about efficiency — making sure applications can scale up when needed and stay lean when demand drops.
The Forest Service initially struggled with tools like Beanstalk, which didn’t meet their needs. But the shift to containerization with ECS Fargate marked a turning point. Developers could test applications locally in the exact same environment as production, dramatically reducing failures.
Unquestionably, things are moving smoother now. Devs could now test the exact environment locally with minimal effort.
For Luther, the difference was night and day. “Unquestionably, things are moving smoother now. Devs could now test the exact environment locally with minimal effort.”
By embracing serverless with Lambda, managed databases with Aurora, and scalable container platforms, Cynerge gave USFS apps the ability to handle wildfire-season spikes without wasting resources in the off-season.
Cost Optimization: Doing More With Less
Every federal dollar matters. For USFS, cost optimization was a pillar that couldn’t be ignored.
One example stands out: the HDWI application, originally hosted on Beanstalk. By re-architecting it, Cynerge moved the front end to S3, split the backend into Lambda functions, and streamlined the architecture. The result? Costs dropped by nearly 80 percent.
Cost savings weren’t always obvious. In Luther’s words, “AWS is very good with hidden costs. That’s why you need a good architect.”
Across the portfolio, these optimizations have saved millions — proving that cloud modernization isn’t just about better performance, but better value.
Sustainability: Building for the Future
The newest AWS pillar, sustainability, focuses on reducing environmental impact. For the Forest Service, that mission couldn’t be more fitting.
By right-sizing infrastructure, shutting down idle resources, and modernizing applications, Cynerge has helped USFS cut energy usage while improving efficiency. Every optimization means fewer wasted cycles — and less strain on the environment.
It’s a reminder that smart cloud architecture doesn’t just protect data and budgets. It helps protect the forests themselves.
The Pillars in Action
The six AWS pillars gave Cynerge and the Forest Service more than a checklist. They gave them a blueprint for building a system that could be trusted when it mattered most.
Looking back, Luther summed it up simply:
“To see real apps used by real people across the country running on environments I helped build — that’s tremendous.”
Each pillar mattered. But together, they became the reason why Forest Service applications are now more secure, reliable, efficient, cost-effective, operationally excellent, and sustainable.
This is how Cynerge puts out fires in the cloud — so the Forest Service can put out fires on the ground.
And in the next stories in this series, we’ll go deeper: showcasing individual applications like Automatic Flight Following (AFF) and HDWI, and showing how each one embodies a pillar in action.
About the Author
Hanna Shemke
Hanna Shemke keeps Cynerge’s voice sharp and its proposals sharper. As Marketing Director and Proposal Coordinator, she connects vision to execution—making sure every story, strategy, and submission hits its mark.
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