bit media Kubernetes Platform

Challenge

bit media education solutions GmbH focuses on digitalization in the education sector. Among other things, it supports public schools in the administrative execution of school operations and provides innovative, digital learning platforms.

When setting up the portal for final theses (short: ABA-Portal), the goal was to create a technically scalable infrastructure maintainable according to modern standards, based on cloud solutions and Cloud Native standards. At the same time, the infrastructure was to be implemented cost-effectively, ensuring resources only run when they are truly needed.

In addition to the infrastructure itself, a modern software delivery process was to be implemented, alongside modern monitoring that meets current cloud-native standards.

Solution

The infrastructure was fully automated using managed services (e.g., SKS – Secure Kubernetes Service, DBaaS) via Terraform, ensuring that infrastructure updates are performed exclusively via IaC (Infrastructure as Code).

In addition to the basic infrastructure, security best practices were taken into account, implementing automated certificate management, networking, and DNS configuration.

Following the technical setup of monitoring using the Grafana stack (Grafana, Prometheus), Grafana dashboards were established to provide key metrics and centralized monitoring for the entire environment.

Based on the existing source code management tool GitLab and the GitOps Operator ArgoCD, pipelines were established that automate infrastructure updates on the one hand, and enable developer-friendly deployment of software components as well as updates and bug fixes on the other.

The cloud-native backup strategy was implemented using the Kubernetes Backup Operator k8up, which simultaneously forms the foundation for the disaster recovery process.

Impact

Through the setup of the environment and the focus on continuous automation, the ABA-Portal could be deployed on a modern infrastructure within a remarkably short time.

Thanks to pipelines adapted for developers, all deployment and build processes are automated, thereby improving the developers' development experience.

With Kubernetes as the infrastructure foundation, the ABA-Portal is implemented scalably according to modern standards, ideally covering spontaneous traffic peaks.