About the Client

The exclusive distributor of Commence software in Europe. They provide services and consultancy in their domain. They have local presence in several countries in the EU and deliver full operational support and project capabilities on an international level.

The Business Challenge

The client wanted to test containers and wanted a deployment solution using docker. They wanted to build the solution internally and use it to deploy their CI and staging environments. They were already using AWS for their infrastructure setup and had a blueprint ready.

Once the solution was tested in house for about half a year, they had plans to roll it out to their customers.

Although they wanted to work with containers, the in house knowledge on docker was limited and they were not familiar with any of the orchestration technologies.

How Whitehedge helped

The first step for Whitehedge was to ensure that developers were using docker in development and the artifacts generated from the CI cycle were all docker images. For this Whitehedge consulted and trained the clients staff with good practices followed while writing cloud native applications.

The second phase was evaluating the various orchestration tools like Docker Swarm, Kubenetes and Mesos. On careful analysis, kubernetes (K8s) was selected as the preferred orchestrator. This perfect selection of the orchestration tool turned out to be a boon for the client.

The third phase started where in the a platform was built with K8s, docker run time and AWS to provided for easy deployments of applications and was easily consumed by the devops cycle.

The platform was designed such that minimal inputs were needed and with them the entire stack was provisioned and managed. Only the docker images generated from CI and their required instances were needed from the user. The platform then went on to commission appropriate servers on AWS, create security zones, VPC etc. Once the setup was up, the platform then created the master and minions which were managed by the masters and came equipped with the docker runtime.

Container Pods were created on the servers and on top of the pods were replica sets configured in tune with customer requirements.

Finally controlling all the replica sets were deployment templates which could be written for any application and deployed successfully behind load balancers.

The solution was now ready with K8s, docker and AWS, but could be extended to K8s – – .

It was a major achievement in terms of learning a new technology and implementing a solution in it, in a very short duration of two weeks.

The Benefits

Post the platform solution, the client realized that it was production ready and
they didn’t really need to test it out for six months before rolling it to their
customers. They were delighted with this turn in events.
The other benefits that came out of building a platform were

• Basic knowledge of containers sufficient
• Although the client had good technological expertise on AWS, the
  platform per se didn’t need a highly skilled AWS resource. This came in
  handy when the solution was rolled out to customers who were just
  starting off on AWS.
• No need for configuration management tools like Chef / Puppet and hence
  the client saved on these resources.
• Easy, fast and Production ready deployments.
• Out of box monitoring
• Easy UI access to logs and no need to login to different systems to access
  logs.
• In fact the need to login to systems was almost eliminated except for a few
  critical issues.
• In fact the need to login to systems was almost eliminated except for a few
  critical issues.
• Solution could be easily consumed by the Devops process already in
  place.

The reduction in cost was immediately visible, since containers can enable dense
infrastructure utilization. The ease of deploying containers on various
environments immediately proved a boon for any process automation, like
devops. Moreover the need to manage a complex codebase for tools like Chef,
was eliminated with containers.

About WhiteHedge

WhiteHedge Technologies is an end-to-end software services and solutions provider to global clients with operations spread across US, Europe and India. WhiteHedge has a team of professionals with expert level experience in various technological and functional domain areas. WhiteHedge offers various engagement models to get engaged with the clients to deliver better business value proposition.