Client
Wolf GmbH
Industry
Manufacturing
Technologies
Azure DevOps/cloud services, Terraform, Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, MQTT, ELK
About the project
Wolf GmbH is a German company renowned for its expertise in heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and renewable energy solutions. With a legacy dating back to 1963, the company has become a key player in the field, offering a comprehensive range of products such as boilers, heat pumps, solar thermal systems, and advanced building management technologies. Wolf GmbH is widely recognized for its commitment to energy efficiency and sustainable practices, making it a leading choice for innovative HVAC solutions on both a national and global scale.
The client’s proactive approach to modernize legacy applications and digitalize operational processes showcases their commitment to staying competitive in a dynamic digital environment.
The multifaceted challenges and potential hurdles that organizations might face when embarking on the implementation of the DevOps methodology as part of their digitalization initiative must be addressed with a common goal in mind, between all the teams, since it is a process that affects a company from top to bottom. Some of the challenges that are important to mention are cultural shifts, technology integration, cross-functional team collaboration, organizational resistance, security and compliance, observability, scalability and maybe the most important, continuous improvement based on a system of clear communication and good feedback.
Challenges
System stability
- Making sure that no change is a “breaking change”, namely it alters the state of the system in such way that other components/applications are affected
Security:
- Ensuring a border between various components, represented by their role in the development process: shared resources, resources that compile in an environment that will be used to test changes, integrate new changes and the production environment
- Establish a well-defined role based approach on managing resources
Scalability
- Making sure the systems have checks in place, as to avoid the resource pressure given by some deployments that might be defined erroneously thus depriving the other deployments that work correctly in the same environment
Continuous improvement
- Ensure that developers have a basic understanding of the processes around developing and deploying an application on a containerized environment
Solution
The introduction of containerized environments offers several significant benefits to a company’s development process, making them an increasingly popular choice in modern software development. Here are some key reasons why we used containerization:
DevOps Alignment
- Containers align well with DevOps principles by promoting collaboration between development and operations teams
- They enable infrastructure as code (IaC) and can be managed using container orchestration tools like Kubernetes, facilitating automation and continuous delivery.
Security and Isolation
- Containers provide a level of security and isolation, with each container running as a separate process
- They help contain security breaches and reduce the blast radius in case of vulnerabilities.
Ecosystem and Community
- Containers have a vibrant ecosystem with a vast library of pre-built images and strong community support
- This makes it easier for companies to find solutions and support for container-related challenges.
Consistency and portability
- Containers encapsulate an application and all its dependencies, ensuring that the software runs consistently across different environments.
- This consistency from development to production reduces the “it works on my machine” problem, making deployments more reliable.
Resource Efficiency
- Containers share the host OS’s kernel, which means they are lightweight and consume fewer resources than traditional virtual machines.
- This efficient resource utilization allows for higher density and cost savings when running applications at scale.
Faster Development and Testing
- Containers can be spun up quickly, reducing the time it takes to set up development and testing environments.
- Developers can easily replicate production-like environments on their local machines, speeding up the development cycle.
Scalability
- Containers are well-suited for microservices architectures and can be easily scaled up or down to handle varying workloads. This scalability is crucial for applications that need to handle traffic spikes.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
- Containers integrate seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines
- Developers can package their applications into containers, which can then be deployed consistently through automated pipelines, reducing deployment errors and increasing release velocity.
Technologies used
Results
In spite of the challenges, we managed to build a resilient ecosystem of Kubernetes clusters, each scoped to a specific environment (test, staging, production), being managed from a central location, with the help of a “single source of truth” approach, scalable and with features like backups and restorations (based on pre-approved internal processes), observability, traceability and logging, ranging from application behaviour going up to the Kubernetes API and resource utilization.
Perspective
In hindsight, our partnership with Wolf GmbH captures the essence of adaptability and innovation. It showcases our commitment to addressing multifaceted challenges and our ability to steer clients toward a more agile and efficient digital future. Together, we’ve pioneered a transformative journey that has not only modernized operations but has also set the stage for sustained growth and innovation.
