HomePortfolioOptimizing Cloud Infrastructure and Reducing Maintenance Costs

Optimizing Cloud Infrastructure and Reducing Maintenance Costs

Manufacturing
Azure
Cloud-Native
Kubernetes
IoT

A provider of industrial software and IoT devices turned to Altoros to optimize cloud infrastructure, enable scalability, and reduce maintenance costs.

Optimizing Cloud Infrastructure and Reducing Maintenance Costs

About the project

Brief results of the collaboration:

  • The provider migrated its industrial IoT suite to Microsoft Azure without downtime and implemented autoscaling, saving dozens of thousands dollars on idle resources.
  • With performance monitoring and anomaly detection in place, the organization ensured predictive maintenance, cutting associated costs by 2x.
  • Thanks to a distributed architecture, the customer laid the foundation for high availability and enabled fault tolerance of the system.
  • By setting up continuous integration / delivery pipelines across development, test, and production environments, the company was able to reduce feature release cycles.

The customer

The customer is a US provider of industrial IoT systems to food manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, etc. The company offers a suite of four software products and six connected devices to monitor temperature and humidity, track assets, as well as manage workforce. Founded in 2016, the organization reported a revenue of $40.6 million.

The need

The customer had an industrial IoT suite to monitor manufacturing equipment and facilities. To store and analyze data collected from connected devices and sensors, the company was using a cloud platform. However, hosting and maintenance came at a hefty price, as well as idle resources. In addition to that, the company experienced issues with platform updates.

The company relied on Altoros to migrate to Microsoft Azure, since the platform had all the necessary tooling for ensuring high availability, achieving scalability on demand, and reducing maintenance costs. The customer also wanted to build iOS and Android apps to enable monitoring on mobile devices on the premises.

The challenges

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues:

  • It was important to ensure zero-downtime migration to a new cloud infrastructure.
  • As the connected devices ran chances of external manipulations and hacker attacks, it was crucial to prevent any security breach.
  • The suite had unpredictable behavior. With the lack of performance monitoring, it was impossible to timely detect bottlenecks and prevent crashes.

The solution

Stage 1. After analyzing the existing infrastructure, engineers at Altoros identified bottlenecks and outlined a roadmap to migrate to Microsoft Azure without downtime.

Stage 2. To further enforce security, engineers at Altoros used Azure Active Directory that implements multi-factor authentication and role-based access control. For extra protection, our developers also applied data encryption. Following the Certified Ethical Hacking methodology, the team at Altoros tested the system for vulnerabilities. With Azure Defender for IoT, our developers enabled monitoring of abnormal activities to timely detect potential threats. By using Azure Sphere, the team at Altoros further protected connected devices from unauthorized access.

Stage 3. By building a distributed architecture, our team prevented a single point of failure, thus contributing to high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance.

Stage 4. Then, our developers enabled autoscaling of resources and load balancing. By employing Zabbix, the team at Altoros made it possible to monitor infrastructure performance across CPU load, memory, HDD space, and service state. On top of that, our engineers implemented issue diagnostics and delivered a notification system that sends alerts on detecting an incident. All this helped to enable predictive maintenance.

Stage 5. To ensure business continuity, our engineers implemented automated disaster recovery. Additionally, the team at Altoros simulated user activity to detect and eliminate risks that could affect product availability. With best practices of test-driven development, our engineers prevented increased platform resilience. By setting up continuous integration / delivery pipelines, developers at Altoros reduced release cycles.

Stage 6. Using Xamarin, our team built a cross-platform app for iOS and Android mobile devices. Finally, our team provided ongoing support in infrastructure optimization and maintenance.

The outcome

Partnering with Altoros, the customer migrated its industrial IoT suite to Microsoft Azure without downtime, ensured scalability on demand and saving dozens of thousands dollars on idle resources. With infrastructure monitoring and anomaly detection, the company enabled predictive maintenance, cutting associated costs by 2x. Thanks to a distributed architecture, the organization achieved high availability and improved fault tolerance. With cross-platform mobile development, the customer significantly reduced expenses, avoiding the necessity to build separate Android and iOS apps, as well as support two different systems.

Technology stack

Platform

Microsoft Azure

Programming languages

C#, Xamarin

Frameworks and tools

.NET, Azure Active Directory, Azure Defender for IoT, Azure Sphere, Zabbix

Database

Azure SQL Database

$40.6M

revenue

2x

maintenance savings

10

industrial IoT systems

Want to develop something similar?

Preloader
Ryan Meharg

Ryan Meharg

Technical Director

ryan.m@altoros.com650 265-2266

4900 Hopyard Rd. Suite 100 Pleasanton, CA 94588