Migrating the Registry to Amazon Web Services
One of ORCID’s major initiatives in 2023 was to plan and execute the transition of the ORCID Registry to a new hosting provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS). The migration project, which was completed in January 2024, allows ORCID to take advantage of AWS’s capabilities for cloud hosting and managed services, while eliminating our previous reliance on a single physical data center.
With state-of-the-art cloud hosting, we immediately improved the resilience of our services. For example, in the event of technical outage at the hosting center, ORCID’s web services will still run seamlessly because our systems are now spread across multiple data centers in different buildings (AWS availability zones), which is marked improvement from our previous risk of single-facility failure.
“After 10 months of very careful preparation, we moved the hosting of the ORCID Registry to Amazon Web Services, and there are a whole range of benefits with that,” said Will Simpson, Director of Technology. “We’re already much more resilient to outages, and we continue to work on security and resilience.”
Long-term benefits
For the longer term, ORCID will be able to increase use of AWS-managed cloud services and so spend less time managing servers and more time delivering value to researchers and member organizations. We are already using AWS Elasticache for in-memory distributed caching in the Registry to improve performance in the UI and APIs. We are currently working toward using AWS Relational Database Service to reduce recovery time in the event of a failure of our core Registry database.
Ultimately, the migration to AWS will make it easier for ORCID to reduce risks, improve resilience, and spend more resources improving our services and functionality for researchers and members. For more information about the migration and ORCID’s strategic initiatives, we invite you to read our 2023 Annual Report. To learn more about ORCID’s commitment to trust and integrity, we invite you to read the ORCID Trust page.
