FISA Kubernetes Migration

Challenge

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

With the rising number of new customers, the scalability of both infrastructure and software became a fundamentally important topic. Necessary manual steps during new customer onboarding were to be fully automated. Infrastructure components needed to be easily scalable while maintaining strict separation of individual customer data.

In addition to modernizing the infrastructure with cloud services, potential infrastructure costs needed to be optimized to offer Envoria as a modern, multi-tenant capable SaaS solution.

All software delivery processes were to be reviewed and modernized as part of the renewal.

Data storage had to meet strict security and compliance guidelines to ensure adherence to stringent data protection regulations and GDPR.

Solution

The creation of individual environments and the cloud infrastructure based on Secure Kubernetes Services (SKS) from Exoscale was completely automated using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) via Terraform. The development environment was configured to be active only during working hours, with the capability to optionally be fully spun up in under 5 minutes.

The existing GitHub infrastructure was expanded with numerous GitHub Actions. These actions modernized and fully automated the build, test, deployment, and release processes for new software versions. Additionally, the GitOps pattern was implemented using ArgoCD.

Kubernetes was set up and configured as the container orchestrator, with a strong focus on security best practices. Beyond the installation and configuration of the Kubernetes clusters and application deployment, bootstrap jobs for applications, database connections, certificate management, DNS management, ingress creation, and autoscaling for Kubernetes were implemented. Furthermore, monitoring and logging were established using Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki.

For new customer onboarding, a pipeline was created that fully automates the process. Furthermore, a database can be pre-populated with demo data via a feature flag, ensuring the customer has test data available immediately during the evaluation phase.

Impact

Envoria was optimized as a SaaS solution to enable rapid infrastructure scaling for new customers through automation. The manually intensive onboarding process was streamlined and automated, allowing a new customer setup to be completed within just a few minutes.

The setup of a cost-optimized development environment and the implementation of autoscaling, enabling high resource density, have significantly reduced infrastructure costs. Simultaneously, the infrastructure was designed to achieve higher application availability.

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

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