Case-Study: How AppDirect Supported the 10x Growth with Kubernetes.
Harsh Gupta
DevOps?? | Cloud?? | Linux (RHEL)?? ? AWS / AZURE? ? Kubernetes?? ? Docker?? ? Ansible??? ? Jenkins/GitLab???? ? Terraform?? ? Openshift? ? Grafana?? ? Prometheus?? ? Mern Full Stack ? GitOps?? |
INTRODUCTION
Embarking on a transformative journey, we unravel the compelling case study of how App Direct, a trailblazer in cloud service commerce, harnessed the power of Kubernetes to achieve an astounding 10x growth.
In this exploration, we delve into the challenges faced, the strategic adoption of Kubernetes, and the remarkable outcomes that propelled App Direct into a new era of scalability, efficiency, and innovation.
From managing unprecedented growth to optimizing operational workflows, this case study is a testament to the game-changing impact of Kubernetes in the realm of cloud service commerce. ????
CHALLENGE
AppDirect provides an end-to-end commerce platform for cloud-based products and services. When Director of Software Development Pierre-Alexandre Lacerte began working there in 2014, the company had a monolith application deployed on a “tomcat infrastructure, and the whole release process was complex for what it should be,” he says. “There were a lot of manual steps involved, with one engineer building a feature, then another team picking up the change. So you had bottlenecks in the pipeline to ship a feature to production.” At the same time, the engineering team was growing, and the company realized it needed a better infrastructure to both support that growth and increase velocity.
领英推荐
SOLUTION
“My idea was: Let’s create an environment where teams can deploy their services faster, and they will say, ‘Okay, I don’t want to build in the monolith anymore. I want to build a service,’” says Lacerte. They considered and prototyped several different technologies before deciding to adopt Kubernetes in early 2016. Lacerte’s team has also integrated Prometheus monitoring into the platform; tracing is next. Today, AppDirect has more than 50 microservices in production and 15 Kubernetes clusters deployed on AWS and on premise around the world.
IMPACT
The Kubernetes platform has helped support the engineering team’s 10x growth over the past few years. Coupled with the fact that they were continually adding new features, Lacerte says, “I think our velocity would have slowed down a lot if we didn’t have this new infrastructure.” Moving to Kubernetes and services has meant that deployments have become much faster due to less dependency on custom-made, brittle shell scripts with SCP commands. Time to deploy a new version has shrunk from 4 hours to a few minutes. Additionally, the company invested a lot of effort to make things self-service for developers. “Onboarding a new service doesn’t require Jira tickets or meeting with three different teams,” says Lacerte. Today, the company sees 1,600 deployments per week, compared to 1–30 before. The company also achieved cost savings by moving its marketplace and billing monoliths to Kubernetes from legacy EC2 hosts as well as by leveraging autoscaling, as traffic is higher during business hours.
“We made the right decisions at the right time. Kubernetes and the cloud native technologies are now seen as the de facto ecosystem. We know where to focus our efforts in order to tackle the new wave of challenges we face as we scale out. The community is so active and vibrant, which is a great complement to our awesome internal team.”
?—?ALEXANDRE GERVAIS, STAFF SOFTWARE DEVELOPER, APPDIRECT