Challenge

Envoria is a versatile, dynamic solution for sustainability reporting implemented by FISA - Financial Software Architects.

With an increasing number of new customers, scalability of the infrastructure and software has become a critically important topic. The necessary manual steps in onboarding new customers should be fully automated. Infrastructure components should be easily scalable, taking into account the separation of individual customer data.

In addition to modernizing the infrastructure using cloud services, potential costs in infrastructure creation should be optimized to offer Envoria as a modern, tenant-ready SaaS solution.

All software delivery processes should be reviewed and modernized as part of the updates.

Data storage should comply with strict security and compliance guidelines to ensure compliance with strict data protection regulations and the GDPR.

Solution

The creation of individual environments, the cloud infrastructure based on Secure Kubernetes Services (SKS) from Exoscale, was completely automated using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform. The development environment was set up in such a way that it is only active during working hours, and it can be completely built in under 5 minutes whenever necessary.

The existing Github infrastructure was expanded with numerous Github Actions. Through Github Actions, build, test, deployment, and the release of new software versions were modernized and fully automated. Additionally, the GitOps pattern was implemented using ArgoCD.

Kubernetes was set up and configured as the container orchestrator, with a focus on security best practices. In addition to installing and configuring the Kubernetes clusters and deploying applications, bootstrap jobs for applications, database connections, certificate management, DNS management, ingress setup, and Kubernetes autoscaling were implemented. Monitoring and logging were established using Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki.

For the onboarding of new customers, a pipeline was created to fully automate customer onboarding. Additionally, a feature flag can prepopulate a database with demo data, enabling the customer to have test data available during the evaluation phase.

Impact

Envoria has been optimized as a SaaS solution to enable rapid infrastructure scaling for new customers through automation. The manually intensive onboarding process for new customers has been optimized and automated to the extent that the setup of a new customer can be completed within a few minutes.

The setup of a cost-optimized development environment and the implementation of autoscaling, allowing for high resource density, have significantly reduced infrastructure costs. At the same time, the infrastructure has been set up to achieve higher availability of the application.

By utilizing the infrastructure of a purely European cloud provider, the setup supports compliance with the GDPR and other data protection regulations.

Through the use of Kubernetes and GitOps, development, pipeline, and infrastructure have been brought up to date and implemented in a future-oriented manner.