Creating A Containerization Center of Excellence to modernize applications in an enterprise
Challenge
Our client launched many successful products in the financial services space, demanding more features, high availability, and faster time to market. The existing platform while functional highlighted many challenges due to the monolithic nature of their applications architecture, complex integration, and different practices of deploying applications across their portfolio.
We needed to come up with a strategy that took a step forward into reimagining the future of their applications, while still solving today’s problems. We also saw this challenge and an opportunity to increase cloud adoption among the client teams, and bring more people around an exciting purpose.
A container strategy seemed to be the best fit, but we also knew that it takes more than just the technology to truly adopt a change.
Solution
After doing a day workshop with a representation from different teams that should be part of the solution (Dev, Infra, Security, Operation), we all agreed that going down the containerization path was the best path forward, and EKS was the chosen service.
Instead of Implementing yet another ad-hoc solution, we started by building a POC to define “what good looks like” modeling around a single application. We then started building the common shared services that could scale this POC into a containerization COE and an onboarding platform (Bootstrapping, CI/CD, Observability, self-healing, etc.)
As we were onboarding the first application, we worked across application teams to identify skill gaps, outline a training plan, and advocate for the values that this solution provided.
Tech Stack
AWS EKS
AWS ECS on Fargate
AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
Fluentbit
Firelense
AWS CodeBuild
AWS CodeDeploy
IaC (AWS Cloudformation)
Serverless (AWS Lambda)
Security (AWS WAF, Cloudfront)
AWS Amplify
AWS RDS
Outcome
Business— Gained confidence by taking the right steps towards building a solid foundation for many product developments to come, and see the value of creating consistency now to gain speed later.
Cloud Adoption—The success of this project expanded the overall expertise of the team and fueled a desire to continue building on AWS. Taking the time to do this right lays the tracks for sustainability, and gets everyone excited to do more.
Culture— Instead of working in silos, this project created a purpose for teams to work together to solve problems, learn together, and celebrate together. This was probably the most fulfilling part of the project.