Utilising the VDC environment to run RSAWEB
Nearly a decade ago Mark Slingsby, Rob Gilmour and the RSAWEB management team made the decision to move the business processes onto the Cloud. Destined to become the leading Cloud experts in South Africa, Mark explains the reason for the move; “It seemed like a no-brainer to us… If you have a business where you are faster to market and more agile, at the end of the day, you win.”
RSAWEB makes use of our own products and by using our Virtual Data Centres, our developers are able to write their own software in a new and exciting way by using new methodologies and by embracing ‘Continuous Delivery’ and a DevOps organisational culture.
“The move to the Cloud made a massive impact on the way we do business,” says Mark, “quite simply, we can now write and produce everything differently. Through the Cloud, our developers can now build software and actually check that it is working properly, as they go!”
A DevOps culture
The once clearly defined boundaries and roles of Development, Sysadmin and Operation teams are slowly changing and morphing due to the rapid uptake of the Cloud and the flexibility and scalability that this brings to a development team. This change and growth has neatly set the stage for the DevOps culture, which has rapidly gained traction in forward looking companies in South Africa.
Faster product development and delivery
“Moving RSAWEB systems into the Cloud has not only enabled us to scale resources as we have required but the scaling of these resources can also be accomplished without any disruption. Our in-house development teams are now able to continuously create and deliver, pushing products, features or updates to market at a far more rapid speed that was previously possible,” explains Mark.
Through the use of the Virtual Data Centres (VDC) the RSAWEB development team are able to rapidly deploy solutions with Orchestration/Automation tools such as Chef, Ansible and Jenkins. The readily available Cloud resources also allow us to dramatically reduce the time it takes to on-board new engineers, which is achieved through scripted orchestration or using VDC templating features. New development, production and the staging of environments now takes a matter of minutes instead of days to configure.
Agility and flexibility
While the use of the VDC’s has enabled extremely rapid deployment of software, they have also promoted agility and flexibility within the business as the development team no longer needs to wait for four to six weeks for the software to arrive before it can be tested and bugs fixed.
Through a DevOps environment RSAWEB strives to bridge the barriers between the various sections of the business so that we can align much more closely around business goals. “We have found that this can be a game-changer if done correctly,” says Mark.
Added security
Making use of the VDC’s EdgeGateway has also provided complete control over the security of the RSAWEB system. With the VDC we are now able to publicly expose only that which is necessary, shielding our core infrastructure like database and file storage from malicious traffic. This added security feature is not only beneficial in shielding the system from attacks but it has also saved us numerous hours in support and development.
Access to cutting edge methodologies
Through our use of the cloud, the RSAWEB team has been able to leverage the power of cutting edge development methodologies such as Service Object Oriented Architecture (Micro Services) to solve business problems in new and exciting ways.
We know that it would be impossible to conduct software development as we do without Cloud. These design patterns isolate business requirements into respective domains or services, allowing us to not only scale resources but also manage business complexity in ways unique to this model.
The Service Object Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables the RSAWEB development team to be truly agile, strategically positioning the business to rapidly adapt to ever changing market conditions, requirements and trends. By abstracting business requirements and computing resources in this manner RSAWEB are able to swop out whole components of the development ecosystem for more effective solutions with minimal disruption to the business. The move to the Cloud and evolved models of development have also placed the business in the prime position for the coming migration to Containerization and Platform As A Service (PAAS).
With VDC, RSAWEB is looking to realize hosting cost reductions of up to 50%, which would ultimately be a true cloud solution that offers incredible uptime benefits and effective management of computing resources.
Ultimately the move across to the Cloud has fundamentally impacted on the business from a variety of levels and has helped to place RSAWEB as the leaders in Cloud-based technology in South Africa. If you are wanting to move your business across to the Cloud why not speak to one of our experts today?
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