Neel Shah, VP Software Development
April 11, 2024

The AICPA Exams Team (Association of International Certified Professional Accountants) plays a significant role in the Uniform CPA Exam. The Uniform CPA Exam is developed and scored by the AICPA Exams Team. They set the exam’s content and format and ensure that they are relevant to the accounting profession. They also provide a Sample Test and content outlines for candidates studying for the exam.

The migration of the AICPA Exams Team’s internal systems to the cloud represented a seminal step in our journey to operational excellence and technological innovation. This blog post delves into the overarching drivers of cloud migration, the specific motives behind our strategic pivot, the transformation paths we explored, and our embracing of serverless technologies. It also discusses the macro benefits of transitioning to a cloud-native platform.

Motivations for Cloud Migration

The drive towards cloud migration is influenced by myriad factors that resonate across industries:

  • Scalability and Flexibility: Provisioning solutions that can scale business needs.
  • Cost Management: Transitioning from capital-intensive models to operational expenditure frameworks.
  • Modernization: Updating applications and infrastructure with modern, cloud-based tools.
  • Security and Compliance: Tapping into cloud providers’ superior security features and compliance frameworks.
  • Innovation: Accelerating service development and deployment.

Beyond these industry factors,  our decision was uniquely shaped by the challenges of operating our own data center:

  • Infrastructure Costs: The financial burden of maintaining physical data center space.
  • Hardware Upgrades: Regular, costly hardware upgrades are needed to stay technologically current.
  • Operational Limitations: The realization that cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure offer capabilities far beyond what we could achieve.

Transformation Paths

In general, there are two major paths for our cloud migration, each prioritizing either operational efficiency or innovation focus:

  • Rehost (Lift and Shift): Moving applications with minimal changes for immediate benefits.
  • Refactor, Re-Architect, Rebuild: Making significant changes to leverage cloud capabilities fully, ranging from minor adjustments to complete application redesigns.

Our Path: Rehost and Re-Architect

We chose to rehost our legacy applications and re-architect our core systems. This strategy allowed us to quickly realize the benefits of cloud computing while preparing for a comprehensive, long-term transformation.

The Cloud Native Advantage

Cloud-native is a design and development approach to build applications explicitly for cloud environments, taking full advantage of cloud services and architectures.This move reflects a strategic alignment with the evolving technological landscape and offers several benefits:

  • Enhanced Scalability: Built for automatic scaling with demand to ensure performance with no manual effort.
  • Improved Resilience: Utilizes microservices and cloud infrastructure for higher reliability, with designs that tolerate and recover from failures.
  • Faster Time to Market: Embraces DevOps and CI/CD practices for fast feature updates and supporting a rapid feedback culture.
  • Cost Efficiency: Uses a “pay-as-you-go” model, which reduces upfront hardware investments and minimizes the costs from resource over-provisioning.
  • Operational Efficiency: Automates IT operations like scaling and deployment so teams can spend time on innovation.
  • Enhanced Security: Uses the plumbing of robust security features and automates policies with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), minimizing attack surfaces through isolation.
  • Community Support: Benefits from a vibrant ecosystem providing tools, best practices, and a pace of innovation that no individual company can match.
  • Development Agility: Provides developers with services and tools to help them rapidly innovate and provision resources.
  • Sustainability: Optimized use of resources reduces energy consumption — which can greatly help meet environmental goals.

Choosing Serverless Over Containers

We had to make a strategic decision: containers or serverless. Yes, containers provide more control and flexibility. But that comes with increased infrastructure management and complexity regarding scaling.

Why did we ultimately choose serverless? Because of the distinct advantages it brings with it:

  • Operational Simplicity: Reduced infrastructure oversight, minimizing operational tasks.
  • Automatic Scalability: Effortlessly expands with demand.
  • Cost Efficiency: It charges for compute time, which means significant cost savings for occasional workloads.
  • Faster Deployment: Our developers focus more on their code and less on infrastructure, accelerating the time to get a product to market.
  • Built-in Availability: Provides high availability and fault tolerance without extra effort.
  • Focus on Development: Frees developers to enhance functionality instead of server management.
  • Event-driven Integration: It can fit with event-driven architectures for effective trigger-based applications.

Conclusion

Our move to the cloud and the decision to go cloud-native hasn’t just been about keeping pace with technology. We are future-proofing our operations, engaging top talent, realizing cost efficiencies, and ensuring the seamless delivery of the Uniform CPA exam. This move underscores our commitment to innovation, operational excellence, and the long-term success of the AICPA Exams Team in the digital age.

About the Author

Neel Shah is a seasoned technology leader passionate about driving innovation and delivering exceptional software solutions. As the Vice President of Software Development at Strasz Assessment Systems, Neel brings a wealth of experience in leading high-performing teams, shaping strategic initiatives, and fostering a culture of excellence. With more than two decades immersed in the technology sector, Neel has developed a deep understanding of distributed systems and Service-Oriented Architecture. This expertise enables him to spearhead the creation of scalable, resilient software solutions tailored to meet the dynamic needs of clients and stakeholders, underpinned by pragmatic technology choices. By fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement, Neel empowers teams to push the boundaries of what’s possible and deliver impactful results that drive business growth. In his leisure time, Neel enjoys quality moments with his wife and two boys, playing cricket, watching movies, and staying updated on the latest developments in science and technology.

John DeFalco, SR Software Engineer
August 6th, 2021

Ken White is a Scrum Master for one of our Agile development teams. He’s also our Production Support Operations Manager for the same customer. I don’t believe combining these roles is a practice unique to Strasz. What really sets Ken apart from most others is, he is also currently the Fire Chief for the Liberty Corner Volunteer Fire Department1. So, it goes without saying that Ken has both an educational background and practical experience to bring teams of people together with a high likelihood of success. We’ve all heard of the chicken and egg paradox. So was the fire department the chicken and his college degree the egg? Or vice versa?

Ken (left) alongside the Chief (middle) and Deputy Chief (right) of the Liberty Corner Volunteer Fire Department.

Ken White is a Scrum Master for one of our Agile development teams. He’s also our Production Support Operations Manager for the same customer. I don’t believe combining these roles is a practice unique to Strasz. I’m sure there are plenty of other leaders in the field that are holding down both positions. What might be rarer, Ken has a degree in Management Information System & Operations Management that almost exactly aligns with his current job responsibilities. What really sets Ken apart from most others is, he is also currently the Fire Chief for the Liberty Corner Volunteer Fire Department1. So, it goes without saying that Ken has both an educational background and practical experience to bring teams of people together with a high likelihood of success. We’ve all heard of the chicken and egg paradox. So was the fire department the chicken and his college degree the egg? Or vice versa?

James Lipton from The Actor’s Studio is often fond of saying, “Let’s start at the beginning.” Back in the summer of 1986, Ken was working as a lifeguard and snack bar manager at a local pool when a friend approached him about joining the volunteer fire department. He hadn’t previously given it a thought. Yet, he immediately became fascinated by the inner workings of how the organization came together as a team. He was impressed that such a large group of volunteers could be coordinated to achieve great things in the community. The do-it-yourselfer in Ken was also fascinated with the department’s dizzying array of tools and equipment. 

Later that same year, he went off to college at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Ken conveys his choice of UNCG simply as “My parents could afford the school, and it was farther away than Rutgers.” As was previously stated, he pursued a degree in Management Information Systems & Operations Management, which was a natural choice, in retrospect. From early adulthood, Ken had a predisposition towards organizational thinking, technology, leadership, and management.

After graduating from college, Ken began his career at AT&T as a software developer and simultaneously became more involved with the fire department. He started his coding journey with an internal COBOL development program at AT&T. Ken rose through the organization over the next ten years. Ken eventually became a District Manager, with a staff of 80+ and 3 direct report managers. Concurrently, he rose through the ranks of the fire department. He became President, then worked his way up as Assistant, 2nd Assistant, then eventually Chief. At the fire department, Ken leads a multi-faceted team of 60 volunteers. 

The overlap of these two paths is significant. Both have a business and support side that require intense management, efficient organization, and experienced leadership at a high level. A software company’s business revolves around planning and scheduling releases, conducting regular status meetings, managing budgets, and interfacing with customers. The fire department is organized as a not-for-profit business and, as such, has a President that presides over the company’s business. This includes filing tax for

ms with the state, managing donations, fiscal planning, project planning, creating specifications, procurement, politics, and leading public meetings. Both positions require an individual at the top with stellar organizational and planning skills and a positive demeanor supporting customers.

For a software company, every product requires support. Users will encounter defects, and those defects must quickly be researched, verified, and remediated. Customers will occasionally have ad-hoc, high-priority requests in response to their own business’ stimuli, colloquially referred to as “fires” by the production support team. In parallel, the support side of the firehouse handles responding to dispatched 911 calls and extinguishing actual, physical fire alerts sent through an Incident Command System. When asked which fires are harder to control, Ken quipped, “The actual fires … usually”. 

On both fronts, teams are composed of individuals with specific roles and skills. For a software company, those roles are typically developers, designers, quality assurance, and IT. Team members use their varied skills and come together to create solutions. When a challenge arises, Developers will research the code base and provide technical solutions. Production support accesses the logs in production and applies their working knowledge of the system and the user’s workflow to determine how to recreate the issue. IT investigates network, security, and server-related issues. The fire department is similarly multi-faceted. The engine company performs fire suppression, the truck company provides ventilation and search capabilities, and others whose job is to provide a water supply. Clearly, both organizations need a respected and capable leader to coordinate the varied problem resolution activities in a responsive and professional manner.

In the summer of 2021, Ken celebrated his 35th year with the Liberty Corner Fire Department. I’d like to extend the celebration by adding to it Ken’s 35th year of applying, like Liam Neeson (Taken), “a particular set of skills,” both technical and managerial, to every aspect of his professional and personal life.

1 http://www.libertycornerfire.org/ – please help their cause by donating!