How does an automobile company use Cloud Control AppZ to migrate some of their critical productivity applications to KUBERNETES?
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Client: A large automobile company with operations in 25+ countries
Challenges:
- Clients were trying to move their workloads using in-house resources to Kubernetes, taking more time and effort.
- There was insufficient in-house expertise to set up the required Kubernetes environment using the best industry practices and security.
- Some of the source code was unstructured and did not follow the best rules, which required re-factoring.
- Again, insufficient knowledge and expertise to set up HA environments.
- The client wanted to build and use a tool-based approach, which gives a repeatable process for them to do upgrades, patching, maintenance and monitoring
easily.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Cloud Control Solutions Inc. (“CCS”)worked with the client to onboard their critical productivity applications to their on-premise Kubernetes (“K8s”) managed cluster with ‘One-click’ deployment capabilities using the AppZ platform.
Once onboarded, CCS offered SRE as a Service to ensure that customers could manage continuous updates, patching, releases, and deployments.
AppZ platform also provided the client with built-in Observability, Monitoring, Alert Management, and Log Management capabilities.
PROJECT OBJECTIVES
- While adopting the AppZ solution, the objectives of the Automobile company were:
- Utilize the latest cloud technologies such as Kubernetes and containers for deployment/management of their critical productivity applications.
- Achieve automation right from Git to the operational tasks to reduce the dependency on DevOps teams and achieve more frequent code releases.
- Leverage the Kubernetes capabilities to establish a highly scalable, available, and resilient infrastructure setup.
- Achieve full observability, logging capabilities, and audit trail for enhanced control, compliance, and audit requirements.
- Eliminate Privileged Access while allowing the existing Infrastructure team members to manage the digitally transformed environment.
- Follow and implement the best practices in Container/Kubernetes setup and security.
SOLUTION
Cloud Control Solutions (CCS) used a Lowtouch, Tool Powered Approach to migrate their workloads to the Kubernetes environment and subsequent automation and operations, including SRE. Using the AppZ platform, CCS could onboard the customer applications and their associated components in HA mode to an on-premise Kubernetes cluster using AppZ Stacks. In addition, the AppZ platform allowed them to have an automated CI/CD pipeline with compliance guardrails enabled. Finally, in-house developed applications were reviewed and given guidelines to follow the best practices.
CCS is also now providing SRE as a Service to the client to take care of the upkeep of the applications and upgrades. At the same time, the customer focuses entirely on their business requirements and new releases.
MIGRATION HIGHLIGHTS
- Three Kubernetes clusters were set up in the Client Data Center using VMs for DEV, QA, and PROD environments.
- Three node VMWare Kubernetes clusters were built using AppZ, with one master and two worker nodes for each environment.
- Client Applications run behind internal LB, protected by firewalls.
- Standard AppZ Stacks (re-usable, curated, and scanned images) with client changes were employed to deliver application components.
- The vault was used to manage all secrets, which improved security.
- Grafana and Prometheus monitoring dashboards are integrated, as are alert managers.
- Implemented real-time file sync for data storage and also NFS integration.
- Deployed PostgreSQL in HA mode, using AppZ PostgreSQL HA Stack, ensuring five-nines (99.999) availability.
BENEFITS
- The applications were moved to an on-premises Kubernetes cluster with high availability, scalability, and resilience.
- AppZ provided fully automated GitOps for continuous releases with full automation and control without infrastructure team support.
- CCS AppZ Platform allowed the customer to perform zero-downtime upgrades/ patching of their applications and infrastructure.
- AppZ’s curated application stacks/templates enforced best practices and maximum security for deployed applications and infrastructure.
- No additional resources/expertise is required to deploy or manage the workloads/ environments.
- Complete visibility and observability of the application environment using AppZ Dashboard.
- Automated Alerts from AppZ provide a proactive indication, which helps them avoid performance degradation or unavailability.
- With the help of the AppZ platform, the client can now quickly move the application to any other environment.
ABOUT CLOUD CONTROL SOLUTION
Cloud Control Solutions (“CCS”) offers a lowtouch platform – AppZ, for accelerated migration, modernization, and management of
customer application environments to the cloud. AppZ Stack is a collection of popular application templates, which are curated and hardened, and it helps containerize legacy applications for deployment on Kubernetes for added scalability, resiliency, and
redundancy.
More than 1400 legacy applications have already been transformed using AppZ to leverage the cloud while meeting SOC2, NIST, and CIS best practices for VMware, Private Cloud, Nutanix, AWS, Azure, Oracle Cloud, and Google Cloud deployments.
Learn more at eCloudControl.com | info@ecloudcontrol.com
