This document discusses Best Friends Animal Society's use of AWS and N2WS. It summarizes that Best Friends initially started using a few AWS EC2 instances and later migrated critical applications to AWS. It also discusses how N2WS provided an easy backup and disaster recovery solution. It describes Best Friends' growing use of AWS, with plans to use services like S3, Athena and Glue to build a data lake for analytics. The overall document outlines Best Friends' journey to the cloud with AWS and how it has helped them scale their operations.

1. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Best Friends Animal Society saves animals (and
data) with N2WS and Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Brent Bain
Systems engineer, Cloud architect
Best Friends Animal Society
S V C 2 1 0 - S
Wade Peatross
Director infrastructure & operations
Best Friends Animal Society

2. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Agenda
Call to action: Save them all
Migrate, scale, optimize: An AWS love story
Disaster recovery: Where cloud meets world
Metrics that matter: How we set key performance indicators (KPIs) and track goals
Get involved: The pets of California and the nation need you to achieve our 2025
goal

3. S U M M I T © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

4. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
A brief intro to Best Friends
• Founded in 1984
• Started with a single sanctuary in Utah
• Now with life-saving centers nationwide:
• Utah
• California
• New York
• Atlanta
• More coming!
• The Network Partners program

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Every day, nearly 2,200 dogs and
cats are killed in our nation’s
shelters simply because they don’t
have safe a place to call home.
It doesn’t
have to be
this way.
An urgent need

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This is an extraordinary moment. We are tracking our progress and
setting milestones to achieve our goal with our partners.
?
SAVE RATE
77%
save rate
90%
save rate
1984
Number of pets
killed in shelters is
~17 million
2018
Number of pets
killed in shelters is
~800,000
2025
Number of pets
killed in shelters is
ZERO
Advancing toward “No Kill 2025”

7. By 2025, we want to ensure that
100% of healthy and treatable
shelter pets are adopted and not
killed.
We are
on a mission to

8. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Saving
lives
Uniting
the
movement
Mobilizing
the
public
Our plan to save them all
Innovative ideas coupled with a
30+ yearhistory ofsuccess

9. What we’ve done:
Transformed the adoption
experience
What we’re doing:
Saving those
most at risk
Saving lives SAVING
LIVES
UNITING
THE
MOVEMENT
MOBILIZING
THE
PUBLIC

10. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Saving lives
Where we are going: Transforming the way people
identify, connect with, and adopt pets
• Launched an innovation fund to provide seed money for bold ideas that
overcome top adoption barriers, such as new ways to find pets, transportation
solutions, and facilitating fostering
• Helping animal shelters throughout the country transition to a community
animal resource center model designed to support people and their pets and
prevent animals from entering shelters in the first place
SAVING
LIVES
UNITING
THE
MOVEMENT
MOBILIZING
THE
PUBLIC

11. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Saving lives
Where we are going: Transforming the way people
identify, connect with, and adopt pets
• Launched an innovation fund to provide seed money for bold ideas that
overcome top adoption barriers, such as new ways to find pets, transportation
solutions, and facilitating fostering
• Helping animal shelters throughout the country transition to a community
animal resource center model designed to support people and their pets and
prevent animals from entering shelters in the first place
SAVING
LIVES
UNITING
THE
MOVEMENT
MOBILIZING
THE
PUBLIC

12. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Saving lives
Where we are going: Transforming the way people
identify, connect with, and adopt pets
• Launched an innovation fund to provide seed money for bold ideas that
overcome top adoption barriers, such as new ways to find pets, transportation
solutions, and facilitating fostering
• Helping animal shelters throughout the country transition to a community
animal resource center model designed to support people and their pets and
prevent animals from entering shelters in the first place
SAVING
LIVES
UNITING
THE
MOVEMENT
MOBILIZING
THE
PUBLIC

13. What we’ve done:
Built community-based, life-
saving coalitions in Los Angeles
and the state of Utah, both of
which are achieving no-kill
What we’re doing:
We are growing and
empowering our national
network of more than 2,500
partners with resources and
expertise
Uniting the movement SAVING
LIVES
UNITING
THE
MOVEMENT
MOBILIZING
THE
PUBLIC

14. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Uniting the movement
Where we are going: Saving lives on a national stage
• We are creating an enhanced life-saving presence around the
country to provide critical support across the country, with
particular focus on the regions where it is urgently needed
• Our presence will differ from region to region, dependent on
the needs and capacities of each place
SAVING
LIVES
UNITING
THE
MOVEMENT
MOBILIZING
THE
PUBLIC

15. What we’ve done:
Championed life-saving
legislation that ensured safe
and humane communities for
pets and people
What we’re doing:
Inspiring millions to action
through our no-kill mission and
communications center in New
York City
SAVING
LIVES
UNITING
THE
MOVEMENT
MOBILIZING
THE
PUBLIC
Mobilizing the public

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Mobilizing the public
Where we are going: Energizing the nation
• It all starts with awareness. An informed and inspired public
will fuel the no-kill movement by demanding action: an end to
puppy mills, better and more pet adoption options in their
communities, or support for trap-neuter-return programs.
• Engaging with top media, civic leaders, and celebrity
influencers to garner attention and galvanize action for the
thousands of pets dying in shelters every day.
SAVING
LIVES
UNITING
THE
MOVEMENT
MOBILIZING
THE
PUBLIC

17. S U M M I T © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

18. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
We believe…
In love at
first sight.

19. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
AWS story: Love at first Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute
(Amazon EC2) instance
• Nine years ago, we decided to move to the
cloud and built a strategic, cloud-centric
roadmap
• Considered other cloud providers, but AWS
“just made it easy”
• Started with a single AWS account and a few
Amazon EC2 instances
• Hosted our websites

20. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
AWS story: Love at first Amazon EC2 instance
• Nine years ago, we decided to move to the
cloud and built a strategic, cloud-centric
roadmap
• Considered other cloud providers, but AWS
“just made it easy”
• Started with a single AWS account and a few
Amazon EC2 instances
• Hosted our websites

21. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
AWS story: Moving our line of business to the cloud
• Three years ago, we needed a way to manage
much data, tracking thousands of animals in
and out of our life-saving centers and across
our network partners
• Performance issues? What performance
issues?
• Migrated our critical business applications
from on-premises to AWS
• This is when we really began scaling up our
environment

22. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
AWS story: Moving our line of business to the cloud
• Three years ago, we needed a way to manage
much data, tracking thousands of animals in
and out of our life-saving centers and across
our network partners
• Performance issues? What performance
issues?
• Migrated our critical business applications
from on-premises to AWS
• This is when we really began scaling up our
environment

23. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Internal Old web
Org. master
Logging
AWS story: Architecture then

24. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
AWS story: Architecture at that time
Internal Old web
Org. master
*EC2 *EBS
*Storage
Gateway
*VPCNAT
gateway
*Work-
spaces
*VPC *S3 *Cert.
Manager
*WAF
*Glacier
*EC2 *VPC
*Directory
Service
*Systems
Manager
*EC2 *EBS *RDS
*VPCNAT
gateway
*App.
Load
Balancer
*VPC
*VPC *RDS
*Cert.
Manager
*S3
*WAF
*Elastic
Beanstalk
*Cloud-
front

25. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
AWS story: The need for backup and data recovery (DR)
• Loved AWS but had an immediate
issue of, “How do we back this up?”
• Searched AWS Marketplace, and
found N2WS
• From an engineering perspective, it
just worked
• DR function makes recovery easy to
perform in a couple of clicks

26. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
AWS provides the virtual hardware
and protects that infrastructure.
But the data you store within it is
your responsibility.
This often goes unrealized.
AWS shared responsibility model

27. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
AWS provides the virtual hardware
and protects that infrastructure.
But the data you store within it is
your responsibility.
This often goes unrealized.
AWS shared responsibility model

28. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Compliance + data security
Amazon Elastic
Block Store
(Amazon EBS)
issues
Ransomware AZ issues
Human error
Reasons to protect our data

29. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Securely copy backups between twenty data
centers around the world
Combine cross-account and cross-region and
back up data to a highly secure repository on
another continent
One-click disaster recovery for always-available data

30. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
AWS story: Twelve accounts and growing
• In the last six months, we grew from three AWS accounts to fourteen (and
we’re still growing!)
• With seventy-five to one hundred Amazon EC2 instances running on any
given day
• We run over thirty websites across the organization; we can spin up more
sites very quickly via AWS
• The mission this year is big data

31. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
AWS story: Twelve accounts and growing
• In the last six months, we grew from three AWS accounts to fourteen (and
we’re still growing!)
• With seventy-five to one hundred Amazon EC2 instances running on any
given day
• We run over thirty websites across the organization; we can spin up more
sites very quickly via AWS
• The mission this year is big data

32. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
AWS story: Twelve accounts and growing
• In the last six months, we grew from three AWS accounts to fourteen (and
we’re still growing!)
• With seventy-five to one hundred Amazon EC2 instances running on any
given day
• We run over thirty websites across the organization; we can spin up more
sites very quickly via AWS
• The mission this year is big data

33. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Internal Old web
Org. master
Logging Public
HackathonsSandbox Developer Data QA Data prod.
AWS story: Architecture close-up

34. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Internal Old web
Org. master
Logging Public
Developer Data QA Data prod.
Amazon EC2 Amazon EBS
AWS Storage
Gateway
NAT gateway Amazon
RDS
Elastic Load
Balancing
Amazon
WorkSpaces
Amazon
VPC
Amazon S3 AWS Cert.
Manager
AWS Lambda
Amazon S3
Glacier
Amazon EC2 Amazon VPC
AWS Directory
Service
AWS WAF AWS
Systems
Manager
AWS Elastic
Beanstalk
Amazon
CloudFront
Amazon S3
Glacier
Amazon S3 Amazon
Route 53
AWS WAF
AWS Cert.
Manager
AWS Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon API
Gateway
AWS
CloudTrail
AWS Confit
Amazon
CloudWatch
Amazon
Macie
Amazon S3
Amazon
DynamoDB
AWS
CodePipeline
AWS Cloud9
AWS
CodeDeploy
AWS
CodeCommit
Sandbox
AWS story: Architecture close-up
Amazon RDSAmazon VPC
AWS Cert.
Manager
AWS Lambda
Amazon S3
Amazon
CloudFront
AWS WAF
NAT gatewayElastic Load
Balancing
Amazon
VPC
Amazon EC2 Amazon EBS Amazon RDS
Hackathons
AWS Lambda Amazon S3
AWS Lambda
Amazon S3
AWS Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
Athena
AWS Glue
Amazon S3
AWS Lambda
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
Athena
AWS Glue

35. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
AWS story: Upcoming…optimization + analytics
• Currently using a good, old-fashioned data warehouse
• Moving to an AWS “data lake” using Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena, AWS
Glue, and others
• Workloads specific to data gathering, manipulation, and understanding
• Tracking KPIs
• Real-time reporting
• Real-time data gathering from 2,200 shelters around the country

36. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
AWS story: Upcoming…optimization + analytics
• Currently using a good, old-fashioned data warehouse
• Moving to an AWS “data lake” using Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena, AWS
Glue, and others
• Workloads specific to data gathering, manipulation, and understanding
• Tracking KPIs
• Real-time reporting
• Real-time data gathering from 2,200 shelters around the country

37. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
AWS story: Upcoming…optimization + analytics
• Currently using a good, old-fashioned data warehouse
• Moving to an AWS “data lake” using Amazon S3 and Amazon Athena, AWS
Glue, and others
• Workloads specific to data gathering, manipulation, and understanding
• Tracking KPIs
• Real-time reporting
• Real-time data gathering from 2,200 shelters around the country

38. S U M M I T © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

39. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
That they rescue
us, too.
We believe…

40. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
DR: Hurricane Katrina (2005)
• Hurricane Katrina blew the doors off the
nation’s disaster response establishment
• The first natural disaster in which Best Friends
was a major player
• Best Friends was the first national organization
on the ground and the last one to leave,
helping:
• Displaced pets and strays in need
• Reconnecting pets with owners
• Overwhelmed shelters
• Prevent a spike in shelter killings

41. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
DR: Hurricane Harvey (2017)
2,800
volunteers
120
animal welfare
groups
~3,000
animals reunited

42. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
DR: Hurricane Harvey relocations

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DR: Hurricane Harvey relocations

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DR: Hurricane Harvey success story
Meet Thomas
• He survived Hurricane Harvey and
a terrible wound
• Treated and recovered at Best
Friends Sanctuary
• Now happy and healthy, and ready
for a new home

45. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
DR: Hurricane Harvey success story
Meet Thomas
• He survived Hurricane Harvey and
a terrible wound
• Treated and recovered at Best
Friends Sanctuary
• Now happy and healthy, and ready
for a new home

46. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
DR: California wildfires
• In five days, brought in 103 dogs and cats to our center that had been
displaced by the Woolsey Wildfire
• A call for foster homes at LAAS over the weekend was also a huge success,
resulting in 214 pets being cared for temporarily in homes
• Another 285 were adopted.
5
days
103
dogs and cats
brought to
our center
285
animals adopted

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Data tracking: States that need the most support

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Data tracking: States that need the most support

50. S U M M I T © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

51. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
With love and
compassionate action,
everything is possible.
We believe…

52. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Together, we have the opportunity to do
something simple and profound. Together,
we can change the world for the better.
Together, we will save them all.
They need us, and we need you!

53. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Get involved with Best Friends Animal Society
• Donate or volunteer with Best Friends
• Sign up or learn more at BestFriends.org
• Join one of our hackathons
• Start using N2WS Backup & Recovery
to protect your AWS data:
• Option 1: Sign up directly at aws.amazon.com/marketplace
• Option 2: Spin up for a fully functional, 30-day free trial
at n2ws.com/trial and get $100 in AWS credits as a bonus

54. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.S U M M I T
Thank you!
S U M M I T © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Brent Bain
brentb@bestfriends.org
Wade Peatross
wadep@bestfriends.org