Siemens Digital Industries' core infrastructure is now delivered by a Kubernetes and Cloud Native Platform designed, built, and supported by LiveWyer

Challenges

The customer sought expertise in developing a sustainable and scalable Enterprise Kubernetes platform, along with the requisite tooling. They required professional guidance on initiating the project, selecting the appropriate toolset, and ensuring the architecture, design and build were aligned to industry Best Practices.

Solutions

LiveWyer began implementation with a compact, specialised engineering pod, which held industry Best Practices at the heart of their decision making, a strategy that has consistently outperformed larger alternative delivery methods. This technically proficient pod of engineers maintained technical excellence, making difficult design decisions, whilst adopting the client’s hard business constraints. This proved pivotal in landing on a robust and scalable architecture, which accommodated for the clients chosen toolsets.

The investment in detailed design and proof-of-concept stages delivered immense value, culminating in a solution that has stood the test of time, and successfully expanded to a global scale and now incorporates multiple cloud providers.

As of July 2024:

Full Report

Introduction

We work closely with the Customer Product Owner to ensure that the appropriate skillsets were provided by the initial LiveWyer engineering pod’s engagement. The structured exchange of onboarding requirements ensured a frictionless onboarding, allowing the engineering pod to begin addressing the customers technical and business objectives from day one.

Requirements

The development of the Platform was based on numerous client technical and business requirements:

1. The principle that the Platform should be maintainable by a small Operations team throughout the platform’s lifecycle.
2. The Platform must abide to rigorous and robust security protocols.
3. Seamless integration within the customer’s extensive private cloud network, resolving their primary challenge of establishing the hybrid cloud network.
4. Abide to a methodology of Build Once, Deploy Anywhere (BODA).
5. Effortless horizontal and vertical scaling.

Architecture, Design & Build

The LiveWyer Engineering Pod adopted Agile Practices to allow fast feedback loops with the key client Stakeholders. The LiveWyer working partnership ensured transparency, and each deliverable’s required input was achieved. During the Architecture & Design Phase, we established a North Star backed by ten key principles to underpin not only the Platforms Architecture, Design and Build, but throughout the full Platform lifecycle.

1. Declarative configuration: Operators define the desired state of the Platform and let the system converge to the desired state.
2. DRY - Don’t repeat yourself - Operators make extensive use of abstractions and libraries in the code base.
3. Infrastructure as Code through the use of Tools such as Packer, Terraform, Kubernetes and others.
4. A GitHub Flow used for develop Helm charts and container images, with an MR and Release Pipeline for Continuous Integration (CI).
5. Deliver infrastructure at scale through GitOps and Continuous Delivery (CD) processes whilst retaining the ability to deliver changes to specific clusters and cluster groups regardless of cloud provider, and customer specific requirements.
6. Pull Model (as opposed to Push), to ensure the Platform can scale effortlessly.
7. Focus on interfaces and frameworks which respects the clear boundaries of the layers of the infrastructure and its interfaces. This allows the Platform to provide the same capabilities regardless of the underlying infrastructure and Cloud provider (VSphere, Azure or AWS).
8. Well planned and well defined Taxonomy - Using naming and tagging conventions for all objects at every level to ensure predictability.
9. The solution should utilise Open Source wherever feasible.
10. Adopt the Infosec Industry Best Practices for RBAC, least privilege principles, encryption, regular audits and more.

Security Certifications

As per customer requirements, it was vital the Platform achieved the necessary Security certifications and compliance acceptance. LiveWyer consistently assisted the customer throughout these processes, and on a cyclical basis, the Platform would consistently achieve the required successful outcomes of both ISO27001 & SOC2.

Observability

LiveWyer’s observability capability integrated monitoring, alerting, metrics, and logging across all clusters to proactively resolve issues in the multi-cloud Platform. It provided thorough management of cloud services and infrastructure, optimised error handling, enhanced performance with integrated tracing and code profiling, and maximised operational efficiency and resource utilisation.

Operations

LiveWyer empowered the customer with a flexible, modular Kubernetes Platform, offering optional capabilities for customisation and supporting application deployment on both public and private clouds. This approach catered to various customer needs and maturity levels, including TLS and data persistence options. The elegant Platform design and build also streamlined Day 2 operations, enabling both LiveWyer and customer engineers to manage, upgrade, and ensure the platform’s ongoing health and reliability.

Operational Validation

LiveWyer conducted successful Operational Validation Testing. This involved extensive testing of the infrastructure, enabling the engineers to emulate real world platform failuresand confirm changes within a secure, isolated environment without interfering with ongoing client facing operations. The secondary, but equally important benefit of the approach, is the upskilling of the customers engineering team, in order to train and provide hands on platform operation and maintenance experience in a non-production and isolated environment, in readiness for day two operations.

As of July 2024:

Conclusion

The project grew from a small initiative, and a single pod of LiveWyer engineers, to become a prime example of applying Kubernetes technology. Thanks to our Platform, a new Cloud initiative within the customer was created, and the project has expanded to over 100 clusters, far exceeding its original goal of just five. Despite facing competition from larger enterprise projects, LiveWyer’s commitment to strong fundamentals has been key to the project’s success. Our focus on building a solid foundation has enabled the Platform to scale successfully, and has cemented LiveWyer as a trusted partner for the customer. Together, we have built a robust and scalable platform that minimises technical debt, removes the need for a large support team, but excels in every evaluation.

Today, the Platform is a cornerstone of the customers cloud infrastructure, and its success and continued growth to additional Regions and Cloud Providers is a testament to LiveWyer’s strategic involvement from the start. This underscores the power of strong foundations, as the strategic partnership continues to achieve groundbreaking scale, efficiency and expansion.