A Fortune 500 contract manufacturing firm hosts a portal for its customers to have complete real-time visibility into the manufacturing pipeline. Over time, the evolving needs of customers made it critical for the firm’s portal to support high availability, geographic scalability and high velocity deployment. Biarca ported the firm’s portal from AWS to GCP, leveraging the high availability/resiliency provided by Kubernetes and the software driven, rapid deployment provided by Hashicorp Terraform to cover all the firm’s requirements well into the future.
The Challenge
As the contract manufacturing firm’s customer base expanded, new customer challenges were:
- The portal cannot have any down time
- The portal has to service clients spread across the globe.
- The portal has to respond to extreme elasticity in user traffic.
Customized Solutions from Biarca
As a first step, Biarca helped the contract manufacturing firm to break down the challenges it faces into their underlying requirements:
- The portal cannot have any down time. The platform hosting the portal has to provide:
– Resilient recovery of failed components
– Rolling software upgrades - The portal has to service clients spread across the globe. The platform hosting the portal has to have a global edge service presence for fast response.
- The portal has to respond to extreme elasticity in user traffic: The platform hosting the portal has to provide high velocity, elastic scalability in deployment of instances.
Biarca determined that GCP was by far the best platform to host the portal. GCP’s Kubernetes engine (GKE) provides built-in resiliency and auto-scalable managed container orchestration services. Kubernetes’ ‘Rolling Update’ feature employs Blue-Green deployment strategy to ensure that software upgrades are hitless. And Hashicorp Terraform’s integration with GCP provides a code driven infrastructure to automate creation & deployment of new instances, at velocity.
Biarca migrated the portal from AWS to GCP leveraging Kubernetes clusters, Hashicorp Terraform automated infrastructure creation and Blue-Green deployment. Biarca also provided the portal a persistent database by deploying a managed instance of PostGres DB, using Hashicorp Terraform.
Deploying Microservices based Portal on GKE Cluster with GCE Postgres Instance as Backend:
Customer Value Proposition
The migration to GCP provided the client the following benefits:
- GCP-HA Managed Services automated the management and recovery of all resources
- GCP’s data/line analytics helped improve manufacturing quality
- Customer satisfaction increased because downtime was eliminated and portal response times were uniformly good
- Automation brought about significant cost efficiency in operations.
In the meantime, if you are looking for Cloud Services — DevOps, Kubernetes, Cloud Native Application and Infrastructure Modernization please contact us.
Written by Team Biarca
Contributors: Bhasker Nallapothula, Bhaskar Devalapalli, Sriman Chandupatla