About the Client
The client is a leading European vehicle manufacturer specializing in cars and motorcycles. The client operates from 31 production locations spread across 15 countries and is also a provider of premium finance and mobility services.
The Business Challenge
The client has a huge dealer network in the APAC region and is extensively using a tracking and delivery application with dealers. This application is built using Node and Angular with CouchDB and was already hosted on Microsoft Azure. Moreover, this application was developed in conjunction with a leading logistics company operating globally. The client wanted to move all its local APAC applications to global infrastructure, this was the first application to be containerized.
As the dealer network was increasing there was a need to enhance the current offering and explore other cloud providers who are offering similar or more services for a reduced OpEx. The client set a timeline of 5 months with CloudHedge to ensure the containerization/modernization goes smoothly.
How CloudHedge Helped?
We assessed the client’s current infrastructure and as part of the Managed Services offering and performed the following, the bulk of which was accomplished within 4 weeks:
CloudHedge proposed the execution of this project in a phased manner. CloudHedge identified the best possible approach to containerize the applications without the need to change the application source code. In. addition, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was selected by the client after a critical evaluation of CloudHedge’s suggestions.
Phase 1 – Application Discovery
- The team implemented CloudHedge’s Application Modernization platform – Discover tool, as the first step in this automated containerization process. This tool identified the configuration and dependencies in the applications within minutes.
- The recommendation report generated by the Discover tool gave actionable insights on the upcoming app containerization process, therefore, making the journey highly predictable and cost-efficient.
Phase 2 – Application Transform
- Once the app processes were discovered, the next step was to use the Transform tool to containerize the source application into an optimized Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) on AWS -the accelerated and automated approach.
- With minimal human intervention, the team monitored the progress and ensured the transformation happens within hours.
Phase 3 – Application Deploy and Optimize
- The team focussed on building a pipeline to build container images based on new application releases. The team also designed the pipeline to deploy and update applications to the target EKS environment.
- To accelerate the process, the team used CloudHedge’s Cruize to define all customer environments (connection strings and other passwords will be added to Cruize env variables).
- The container images will read the environment variables and replace the values in the container instance on EKS.
- To streamline updates, roll out, roll back and monitor the environments, the team used CloudHedge Cruize effortlessly.
- Apache Couch Databases were containerized and further integrated with the applications deployed on AWS.
Benefits
- CloudHedge achieved the primary objective of the client to modernize the application without the need to change/alter the source code. Additionally, the solution was deployed through automation, eliminating the need for highly skilled administrators and supervision.
- CloudHedge discovered, containerized, and deployed the entire application within a few weeks instead of the client’s timeline of 5 months. The overall project delivery timeline was almost reduced by 60%.
- Ability to distribute different services on containers instead of increasing the number of VMs thereby reducing the infrastructure costs by 55%.
- Containers spin up new environments in minutes vs days in the earlier process.
- Paved a roadmap for automating containerization of remaining applications to AWS and extract further savings in operational costs while improving efficiency and performance.
- Achieved 99.9999% uptime and performance improvement of their applications with 24/7 operations support. This is on top of the uptime SLA that AWS provides.
