Managing a Public Water District’s Digital Front Door on AWS

THE CHALLENGE

Public-sector websites carry a different level of responsibility than a standard marketing site. They must remain available to the public, support ongoing content and feature changes, and meet expectations for accessibility, security, resiliency, and operational continuity.

For Metro Water, the engagement required a transition and management approach that could support:

• Migration to AWS-based infrastructure
• Uptime and operational stability for public-facing websites
• Coordinated website management across infrastructure and application layers
• Quality assurance and deployment discipline
• Long-term maintainability for Umbraco-based web properties

This was not simply a launch project. It required an operating model that could support both day-to-day site reliability and future improvements.

THE SOLUTION

Metal Toad led the engagement as prime, owning the migration and AWS managed services strategy while coordinating delivery across website operations and infrastructure. ProWorks supported the Umbraco CMS and .NET development work.

The delivery model centered on four areas:

1. Migration and transition leadership

Metal Toad managed the transition and migration effort with a focus on continuity of service, operational readiness, and a stable handoff into managed support.

2. AWS infrastructure and managed services

Metal Toad’s core responsibilities included AWS uptime management, infrastructure monitoring, and managed services for the public-facing environment.

3. DevOps and release discipline

The team’s approach included monitoring and alerts, cloud-based repositories, specialized branching, CI/CD practices, configuration management, and controlled promotion of code and content across development, staging, QA, and live environments.

4. Continuous improvement and platform stewardship

The operating model included quality assurance, regression testing, accessibility review, performance analysis, security review, and roadmap-oriented maintenance to help the platform remain stable and current over time.

THE IMPACT

The result was a public-sector website management model designed around reliability, maintainability, and accountability.

Key outcomes of the engagement story include:

• a prime-led delivery model with clear accountability across migration, AWS operations, and website management
• a structured support approach for uptime, monitoring, and managed services
• a maintainable Umbraco and .NET delivery model supported by a specialist partner
• a platform foundation oriented toward accessibility, performance, security, and continuous improvement
• a public-facing web presence supported by operational processes designed for long-term stewardship, not just launch

ABOUT THE PARTNERSHIP