Merging Commercial Practices into the Federal Government – A Recreation.gov Story

Booz Allen Hamilton was awarded the Recreation 1 Stop (R1S) project in 2016, a 10+ year-long project to rebuild and operate the ticketing and permit website for all of America’s national parks: Recreation.gov. It currently supports 3,500 sites and activities, over 100,000 reservable locations and inventory, and all this for the 19 million outdoor enthusiasts with accounts, plus you too.

We chose Cassandra as the primary database in order to achieve the proposed hot:hot site configuration between the East and West Coasts and deployed it into AWS environments. Building commenced in July 2017 with go-live contractually set for October 1, 2018.

During this presentation, I will discuss the prototyping OSS C*, the adoption of DataStax’s proprietary solution, building and automating efforts, viral events, team and resource constraints, the struggles that come with each, and finally DataStax’s support engagements. Go-live was a success due, in no small part, to the help of DataStax.