Migrating apps to on-premise Kubernetes for an automotive industry client
Project overview
A major organization in the automotive sector, with operations in more than 25 countries, decided to leverage our Cloud Orbit platform to onboard their critical productivity applications to an on-premise Kubernetes cluster and enjoy the one-click deployment capabilities our solution provides.
After onboarding, the client utilized our Cloud Orbit SRE+ services to unlock many benefits:
- facilitate seamless software upgrades,
- enable continuous testing and patching,
- implement real-time monitoring and automated alert management,
- increase systems observability,
- introduce thorough log management capabilities.
Automotive cloud computing vs. on-premises mainframe infrastructure
Our client in the automotive industry decided against private and public clouds and wanted to host its critical productivity software on an on-premise mainframe.
However, the client wanted to adhere to contemporary global standards and utilize a major technology known for its role in cloud computing: Kubernetes. Our infrastructure-agnostic Cloud Orbit platform was leveraged to simplify building an on-premise managed Kubernetes cluster they could use.
Digital transformation challenges
- Lack of internal expertise: The client's in-house IT team exerted a prolonged effort to adopt the Kubernetes technology.
- Safety issues: The in-house team needed additional support to establish a secure Kubernetes environment that follows contemporary best practices.
- Unstructured code: Previously utilized processes resulted in some source code being unstructured, which necessitated refactoring.
- Outdated architecture: While the ability of applications to be always functional was increasingly important for the client, the internal technology team lacked the knowledge to eliminate single points of failure and build a high availability (HA) environment.
- Need for a structured process: The client expressed the desire to implement tool-based, repeatable processes for upgrades, patching, maintenance, and monitoring.
Project goals
Leveraging our Cloud Orbit services enabled the automotive company to reach its objectives:
- Deploy and manage critical productivity applications using the latest cloud computing technologies, including Kubernetes and container solutions.
- Use Kubernetes capabilities to build a highly available, resilient, and scalable infrastructure.
- Enable more frequent code releases and reduce dependence on DevOps teams by automating Git-to-Ops processes.
- Achieve compliance with audit requirements and gain more control over systems by utilizing built-in Cloud Orbit tools to improve audit trail, logging capabilities, observability, and visibility.
- Eliminate previously utilized privileged access while enabling the in-house teams to independently manage the newly transformed infrastructure.
- Improve cybersecurity by following modern best practices in container and Kubernetes solutions.
Our approach and results
We employed a tool-powered, low-touch approach to migrate workloads to Kubernetes as quickly as possible. By leveraging standard Cloud Orbit stacks, we created a highly available on-premise Kubernetes cluster for the client's applications, components, and data.
Then, we focused on introducing automation and improving operations with site reliability engineering (SRE). We used the Cloud Orbit platform to facilitate CI/CD pipeline automation with built-in compliance guardrails. Our expert consultants reviewed previously developed applications and the internal software development processes and offered guidance on implementing and following contemporary best practices in the future.
Today, we provide the automotive industry client with managed SRE services to ensure application maintenance and real-time updates, allowing internal teams to focus on developing new features and fulfilling business requirements.
Client’s benefits
- Improved infrastructure: The on-premise Kubernetes cluster guarantees high availability, scalability, and resilience for migrated systems.
- GitOps automation: Fully automated GitOps facilitates ongoing releases without the need for constant infrastructure team support.
- Zero downtime: The client's new environment enables zero-downtime upgrades and patches to apps and software-defined infrastructure.
- Shifted-left security: Cloud Orbit’s curated application stacks and templates enforced moving test and security tasks left (to the beginning of the development process) and implementing best practices in cybersecurity.
- Optimal resource allocation: The solution requires no additional resources or expertise for efficient deployment and management.
- Improved observability: Cloud Orbit's built-in dashboard provides the client with comprehensive visibility and observability functions.
- Automated alerts: An alerting system that automatically informs relevant staff about irregularities allows proactive maintenance needed to avoid performance degradation and unavailability.
- Independence from cloud services providers: While currently the applications are hosted on-premise, the client can easily migrate them to a cloud provider of choice or any other environment using the Cloud Orbit platform.
- Successful digital transformation: By leveraging Cloud Orbit services to implement innovative solutions, the automotive enterprise transitioned its vital data and apps to a modern, resilient, and scalable infrastructure, embraced automation, and enabled future growth.
Project highlights
Infrastructure details
- The new infrastructure consists of three Kubernetes clusters set up in the client's own data center using virtual machines (VMs) for DEV, QA, and PROD environments.
- We used Cloud Orbit to build three-node VMware Kubernetes clusters (one master and two worker nodes for each environment).
- Client applications are deployed behind an internal load balancer and protected by firewalls.
- Data storage and NFS integration received real-time file sync.
Out-of-the-box Cloud Orbit stacks
- Cloud Orbit’s standard reusable stacks and client-specific customizations were used to deliver application components.
- For example, we ensured 99.999% (five-nines) availability with PostgreSQL in HA mode using the Cloud Orbit PostgreSQL HA Stack.
- Vault’s secrets management was used to enhance data security.
- Grafana and Prometheus were integrated to enable monitoring dashboards and alert management functionalities.
