About the Client Company’s customer engaging platform assists several hundred million visitors across all channels and engages in 1.5 billion conversations annually, most of which are automated. The Business Challenge The client was maintaining the cookbooks directly on the chef server which is not a recommended practise.
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.
About the Client A leading IT firm providing Cloud Migration services and applications for several reputed clients in need for rebranding and faster customizations. The Business Challenge The server migration tool in question was a leading enabler of Cloud Migration application for several clients, but with time was in need of rebranding and faster customizations. It was also important to carefully abstract the business logic such that it becomes easy to scale and to customize. The client was also looking for reusable design along with enforcing best practices to code and development. How Whitehedge helped Considering the prevalent business challenges, Whitehedge started analysing the code after which it was decided to break it down into the following modules: REST API Service Layer written in JAVA-GWT, which could perform the REST API Request-Response Layer that could translate the hashmaps (key, value based object) into JSON string and Vice-Versa. Routing layer which decides which services to be invoked. Controller layer which had actual implementations. Pluggable views (from the development perspective). The philosophy was to have quick and dirty approach, so the views could be added and removed on demand. Easy White-labelling: This was to modify the look and feel of the same application with respect to a specific client. With the help of technologies like JAVA-GWT, Python, Piston and RabbitMQ, the entire implementation was done following the 12-Factor Apps methodology and was turned into a standardized development practise. The Benefits Post refactoring, the application was highly scalable, easily customizable and version controlled. Excellent customer adaptability was achieved. Code reusability helped the client to build a couple of other applications reusing the same code base. 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.
About the Client A leading IT solutions provider with offerings ranging from Applications, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Infrastructure services globally had a number of legacy products distributed across their huge set of customers. Technologies included mainframes and the Microsoft stack, with TIBCO middleware and Cassandra backed. The Business Challenge Large-scale monolithic and internally tightly coupled application to be worked on. Transform a live financial product along with provisioning a seamless customer experience without compromising the current operations. Short and crucial time to market providing no bandwidth for trial and errors. Required effective collaboration across global teams. Security considerations while transforming to cloud solutions. Provision for disaster recovery and scalability. How Whitehedge helped Effective planning of the entire transformation process dividing it in small, measurable and tangible cycle Expert knowledge of core components and segregating the components based on criticality. Sound understanding of the dependencies and choosing only appropriate services to be containerized. Expertise in choosing the right cloud platform that best suits the implementation. Strategizing the future roadmaps of the products. Expertise in design catering to Disaster Recovery and scalability. Strategy used Work to incrementally refactor the monolithic application where we gradually build a new application consisting of microservices and run it in conjunction with the monolithic application. Segregate presentation from the business logic and data access layers helped us achieve the goals faster. Convert the existing modules within the monolithic to standalone microservices. Emphasize on testing and monitoring the implementations. Keep all the stakeholders in loop. The Benefits With the transformation to microservices architecture our client now relies on the latest database and cloud technologies to stay ahead of the competition and turn data into deployed services quickly and easily, enabling them to respond rapidly to changing needs and insights. Additionally, the company states that the flexibility and responsiveness of Whitehedge is helping it to prepare for more growth. 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.
