Unigma, a US-based managed infrastructure services provider, was in the market to develop a multi-tenant cloud management platform to unify and simplify its offerings for infrastructure management. The company chose Altoros to work with IBM’s Cloud Foundry-based Bluemix platform.
The result was a cost-effective system that accelerated cloud infrastructure management dramatically—by a 5x factor, while enabling the monitoring of multiple cloud infrastructures in a unified environment.
A few specific challenges arose along the way. Unigma needed to:
- Optimize requests and connections to cut bandwidth expenses
- Avoid exceeding the limit of concurrent requests to cloud APIs
- Adapt the system to rapidly changing loads
- Guarantee adequate security levels
The platform developed for Unigma relied on microservices and the 12-factor app paradigm, in which each component of the system is implemented as an independent, stateless service.
Additionally, Unigma needed four levels of high availability (HA), zero-downtime application updates, and attachable backing services. The Altoros team addressed these concerns by taking advantage of Cloud Foundry’s built-in capabilities, such as:
- Resiliency and fault tolerance through self-healing and redundancy
- User access and authentication management
- Security and auditing
- Application lifecycle management, including aggregated streaming of logs and metrics
- Release engineering, including provisioning VMs, containers, middleware, and databases with BOSH—an open source tool for release engineering, deployment, lifecycle management, and monitoring of distributed systems
In addition to deploying the Unigma application to IBM Bluemix using a Java buildpack, other services were put to use, including Compose for RabbitMQ, the ClearDB MySQL database, Payeezy, Single Sign-on, and Active Deploy.
Learn why Unigma ultimately chose to work with IBM and Altoros after evaluating other platforms; how the Cloud Foundry-based solution enabled multi-cloud management; and more details about the solution in the Altoros case study: An MSP Provider Builds a Cross-IaaS Management Platform with IBM Bluemix.
Resources:
Altoros and IBM Bluemix Enable a Multi-tenant Cloud Management Solution
