ILSP Keeps services running securely and gains scalability with Google Cloud Platform
The Challenge
Having technology at its core, the company’s mission is to satisfy the requirements of our Commercial Partners regarding security, surpassing their expectations through integral solutions , based on the use of technology, intelligence strategies and tactics of immediate reaction. ILSP system’s continuously monitor thousands of transport units throughout the country, providing security and efficiency metrics in real time to its customers. The company is focused on constant technological improvement, with a R&D department in constant search for tools to generate innovative and efficient solutions that meet both the needs of the company and its customers.
Their core business is to work with GPS geolocation that provide the required data to generate alerts and notifications. this informations allows their monitoring center to make the correct decisions that result in a reduction of the number of unit thefts in transport units. For this, starting in 2017, ILSP started with the construction of platforms based on current technologies that would allow, among other things:
- Increase the number of messages (from GPS) processed (Go from processing 2 thousand messages per minute to 22 thousand messages per second)
- Receive alerts on the web platform in the first two seconds after the event was generated (left route, entered a geofence, panic button)
- Offer high availability in web platforms (Guarantee an annual 99% SLA)
- Store and exploit historical information for the generation of intelligent reports.
Its legacy infrastructure, hosted on-premise, consists of physical windows servers with web server (IIS) and relational database server (SQL Server) roles. The company’s core monitoring application has been developed in-house by ILSP’s development team. It constantly receives GPS locations and general information directly from the units through and web API, which afterwards saves the received data in a traditional SQL Server relational database which then processes the information and creates a set of required business reports and KPIs. Using a web interface, employees and clientes the log to the application in order to visualize these.
The clients was facing three main challenges spawned from this current architecture:
- The SQL relational database has reached an alarming size which is affecting its performance and generating high costs in both licensing and infrastructure.
- Both the web API and the web App do not offer high availability, which is required due to the company’s business model
- The current infrastructure does not provide the required Big Data capabilities
Furthermore, the current architecture proved difficult to update, prone to disruptions and outages and took months to implement significant changes. ILSP knew it was giving up an edge to those competitors and decided to search for a solution.
The Solution
ILSP CIO, Ricardo, Cruz, first contacted Nubosoft in early 2017. His goal, was to evaluate Google Cloud Platform as a viable option for the company’s infrastructure. Our team of cloud engineers, evaluated the current architecture a proposed a gradual migration approach that would ensure the success of the project and avoid any outages throughout the process. After establishing a hybrid environment configurando a Site-to-site VPN, the lift-and-shift process started with the development and testing environments, followed by non-critical applications and finally ending with the production servers.
Nubosoft worked side by side with the company’s IT team, overseeing every step of the migration process and ensuring that the client’s expectations where being met. Once the lift-and-shift phase was successfully finished, propositions where made aimed at optimizing the current architecture with new cloud based server-less and scalable services. These are some of the given recommendations:
- Web servers stopped using a local file storage for BLOB files and started using Cloud Storage. This contributed to lower costs, better performance and the ability to have automatic scalability in the future.
- The location data received from the transport units is now stored in a non-structured and scalable database such as BigTable. This greatly reduced the workload for the relational database, lowering costs and improving the overall user experience.
- BigQuery was introduced as a data lake solution for the entire organization. Providing a single, highly scalable Big Data warehouse for the company’s needs.
Running their business on the cloud has given ILSP the scalability it needs to remain competitive., they now have the freedom to seek out more clients without being concerned about their ability to handle customer requests. And all that time saved not worrying about their infrastructure has helped them bring more and better product features. An considerable part of the improvement of their systems was based on the migration to Google Cloud. By doing so, the company reduced costs and maximized the potential of the developments and can now quickly adjust the number of processors, memory and disks that the applications require for optimal performance.
“Gloogle Cloud is one of the key elements to offer our customers stable, technologically competitive services with reasonable costs, which places us as one of the best options in the market”. Nayeli Avilés Mejía – R&D VP
