Modernizing the U.S. Army's Live Training Product Line using a Cloud Migration Strategy: Early Experiences, Current Challenges and Future Roadmap

摘要

The integration of different networks, databases, standards, and interfaces in support of U.S. Army soldier training is an ever-evolving challenge. This challenge results in U.S. Army organizations repeatedly spending time and money to design and implement irreproducible architectures to accomplish common tasks. In response to this challenge, the U.S. Army has made significant improvements on its Live Training Transformation (LT2) product line to support the needs of live training simulations. Despite the progress with LT2 the Army continues to struggle to support the dynamic needs of the training units. These improvements have been inadequate due to growing technical complexities of interoperating legacy systems with emergent systems arising from advances in technology that suit the users' ever-changing needs. To better address and support the needs of the end-user, a cloud-based modernization strategy was crafted and deployed on the existing Common Training Instrumentation Architecture (CTIA). CTIA is the foundation architecture that provides software infrastructure and services to LT2 product applications. This paper describes some of the U.S. Army's initial experiences and challenges while crafting a cloud-based migration strategy to modernize its LT2 product line and underlining CTIA. It starts by providing some background and rationale and then it discusses the current state of this modernization effort followed by future directions including the U.S. Army's 2025 vision of its LT2 product line. The overall vision entails an evolution plan from today's standalone products to a modernized cloud-based TaaS (Training as a Service) approach. The Army's ultimate goal is to reduce complexity as well as operational and maintenance costs, while providing enhanced training for the Warfighter at the point of need, anytime, anywhere. Finally, this paper discusses some of the current challenges including the exploration of appropriate testing methodologies and related security issues for the SOA-based LT2 architecture and its services.