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 July 12, 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:
- UW-IT Datacenter
- UW-IT Networking
- Windows Managed Servers
- Database Administration services
- UW-IT Information Management developer services
Services included
Technical services generally provided to all customers ‘618 Shared Infrastructure’ include:
- Physical or virtual machines for server hosting
- Purchase and installation of hardware
- UW asset management (on behalf of customer)
- Equipment insurance is not included. Customers concerned about equipment would need to engage the Equipment Insurance administered by the Office of Risk Management via Equipment Insurance Getting Started Guide | Risk Services (uw.edu).
- Necessary datacenter infrastructure, including:
- Secured, climate controlled datacenter
- Server rack space
- Electrical circuits
- Network connectivity
- Server specification and Windows Server installation
- Installation and initial configuration of IIS or SQL Server
- Systems administration and database administration including:
- Windows and SQL license management
- Ongoing Windows and SQL update management
- Monitor server and database performance and health
- Hardware maintenance and repair (or arranging for vendor replacement) for any server under warranty
- Assisting with warranty services
- System and database incident support
- Response is dependent on levels negotiated at server onboarding. For more info see Incident response.
- NOTE: Shared Infrastructure systems running Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2012 R2 are generally considered to be in the containment lifecycle stage until July 2025 for the purposes of whether they can receive 24×7 incident support. This is a special negotiated exception to our general policies.
- Code repository and version control via Azure DevOps Server, including systems administration
- Load balancing services, including systems administration
- File services, including systems administration
Some customers of ‘618 Shared Infrastructure’ also receive:
- Application development, enhancement, maintenance, and support on an as-needed basis subject to availability
Customer responsibilities
Customers within this environment are generally responsible for:
- Installation, upgrades, support, troubleshooting and monitoring of any custom application software
- Data encryption
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. Customers with a need for a different technical architecture are encouraged to migrate to a new architecture and stop contributing to the shared costs when their use of this shared solution has migrated.
The servers in the ‘618 Shared Infrastructure’ will be turned off on July 12, 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.