NUWC Division, Keyport moves torpedo maintenance to the cloud with APCS 3.0 rollout

Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division, Keyport recently completed a multi-year effort to overhaul and migrate the Automated Process Control System—the software used to manage torpedo maintenance across the Fleet—to the cloud. The newly deployed APCS 3.0 promises to significantly increase the speed at which weapons are processed, while reducing system downtime and work disruptions due to network outages.

"APCS went through a major transformation from what we had on a client-server base into making it cloud-based, session-based and web-based," said Melody Anderson, the lead software product owner for APCS.

The transition from the legacy system, APCS 2.5, to the new 3.0 version was executed in two phases, beginning with the lightweight torpedo release in March 2025 and culminating with the heavyweight torpedo rollout this past January.

By migrating the software to an Amazon Web Services cloud environment, the development team eliminated the need for system administrators to manually install the program on individual workstations. Now users across multiple Intermediate Maintenance Activities—including those in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; Yorktown, Virginia; and eventually Perth, Australia—can instantly access records and data and are unaffected by localized network disruptions at Keyport, where the system was previously hosted.

The upgrade to APCS 3.0 involved moving the application to "Cloud Citi," a government-managed AWS environment at Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic in Charleston, South Carolina. This migration presented significant technical challenges, including network bandwidth limits, unclear or missing system requirements that needed to be clarified, and the complexity of the business logic governing the legacy software.

"It was kind of like putting together the pieces of a puzzle," said NUWC Division, Keyport Software Developer Jackson Atkins, who helped integrate the application's various components in the new rollout.

Atkins and others involved in the migration said the new APCS environment has numerous benefits, including the ability to maintain records of transfer to ensure data is not lost if the connection is interrupted and a highly secure, direct server-to-server connection with the Navy's system of record for heavyweight torpedoes.

According to Matt Colescott, a software developer who previously served as a system administrator for APCS, the new APCS is also more secure and easier to maintain due to its new hosting environment.

"Because the servers are now in the same AWS instance, we can do a much more secure direct server-to-server system," said Colescott. "It doesn't traverse any networks other than inside of AWS, which lowers the attack vector."

Colescott added that the cloud environment provides better log monitoring and enables the system's databases to preserve older data that previously had to be deleted to save server space.

APCS users praised the new system. "I feel that the APCS 3.0 is a much smoother program," said Michael Calkins, a lead planner in the Keyport IMA who uses APCS to track torpedo components and direct the IMA's workflow. "It's been a lot stabler since 3.0's come online, and the response time is a lot quicker. We're able to process more weapons and get them in faster."

Calkins added that the new system has reduced the time required for hardware transfers from 20 minutes to less than five, and that the average system downtime during outages has gone from hours to minutes.

The APCS team is working on ways to further improve the platform's reach and technical capabilities. These include adapting APCS to periscope work, bringing the Royal Australian Navy onto the platform and integrating virtual reality into APCS, which would allow technicians to train for leak and corrosion inspections without having to disassemble a live torpedo.

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Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division, Keyport is headquartered in the state of Washington on the Puget Sound, about 10 miles west of Seattle. To provide ready support to Fleet operational forces at all major Navy homeports in the Pacific, NUWC Division, Keyport maintains detachments in San Diego, California and Honolulu, Hawaii, and remote operating sites in Guam; Japan; Hawthorne, Nevada; and Portsmouth, Virginia. At NUWC Division, Keyport, our diverse and highly skilled team of engineers, scientists, technicians, administrative professionals and industrial craftsmen work tirelessly to develop, maintain and sustain undersea warfare superiority for the United States.