Challenge
Swedish Car Manufacturer Accelerates Development with Azure ARO PaaS. CROZ team has been engaged by one of the world-leading providers of transport solutions as well as a provider of industrial and marine engines. We are one of the partners participating in the implementation of the custom developer-oriented, enterprise-grade platform based on the Azure ARO PaaS offering.
A prominent Swedish car manufacturer, renowned for its transportation and engine solutions, sought to boost application delivery speed for its developer teams. They required a highly available, standardized, and externally managed self-service container platform. This platform needed to automate CI/CD pipelines, ensure disaster recovery, and enable zero downtime maintenance. Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO), an enterprise-grade containerization platform on Azure, emerged as the perfect solution.
ARO, standing for “Azure Red Hat OpenShift”, is an enterprise-grade, open-source platform that permits running container-based solutions. This service includes unified signup, service management, and technical support. It offers fully managed clusters and provides integration with Azure services.
Azure ARO delivers a pre-configured, fully managed OpenShift environment with integrated Azure services, streamlining the development process for the car manufacturer. This eliminates the burden of managing the platform infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on innovation.
The benefits of Azure Red Hat OpenShift include:
- Faster application deployment: By leveraging pre-configured templates and automated provisioning, developers can deploy applications quicker, significantly reducing time-to-market for new features and functionalities.
- Scalable and flexible solution: ARO’s inherent scalability allows the platform to effortlessly adapt to the car manufacturer’s evolving needs. Resources can be easily scaled up or down based on development cycles and application demands.
- Simplified development tools: ARO offers a familiar and intuitive developer experience, integrating seamlessly with existing developer workflows and tools. This reduces the learning curve for developers and fosters faster application development cycles.
Solution
HCL and CROZ experts built upon the ARO platform to address the manufacturer’s specific needs. This provided a complete solution encompassing all necessary components for application hosting, including:
- CI/CD pipeline integration: A seamless CI/CD pipeline integration was established, enabling developers to automate the build, test, and deployment processes for their applications. This streamlines the development workflow and minimizes the risk of errors during deployments.
- Disaster recovery and high availability: A comprehensive disaster recovery strategy was implemented to ensure continuous application uptime and data protection. This strategy included functionalities like automated backups and disaster recovery drills.
- Zero downtime maintenance: The platform was configured to facilitate zero downtime maintenance, eliminating disruptions to ongoing development and deployment activities.
The CROZ team collaborated closely with the client’s experts throughout the project, ensuring a smooth implementation and ongoing support for the containerized application environment.
The ARO platform was enhanced with additional OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) operators, including both Red Hat certified and third-party options. CROZ provisioned and configured pre-production and production ARO clusters, including:
- Alerting configuration
- OAuth integration
- Project self-provisioning and templates
- General cluster settings
Cluster logging and observability were crucial for a project of this scale. An Openshift Logging operator based application and infrastructure logging solution were implemented. Configurable Openshift builds were enabled through the configuration of Openshift S2I Docker builds with pre-approved RHEL software repositories.
Cluster-wide image/build/deployment stale-resource pruner cron jobs were configured to optimize resource utilization.
Disaster recovery was ensured through the implementation of a Velero tool-based backup and restore solution. Standard OCP post-installation configuration and security hardening were performed on both ARO clusters. CROZ consultants also addressed numerous configuration issues for deployed operators and software components.
Overall, the project’s success hinged on close collaboration between all parties involved. CROZ’s Openshift expertise and support were instrumental in bringing the project to fruition.
Industry
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