Publink and cloud environment modernization in Microsoft Azure
Deployment date: 2024
Sector: Finance
Microsoft Azure
Publink needed a new IT environment that would be easy to maintain and flexible enough to facilitate the implementation of new applications, while scaling resources in response to growing business demands. Experts from OChK, selected as the key partner to the project, designed and implemented a landing zone in Microsoft Azure and provided Publink with end-to-end support in migrating applications and databases to the cloud. These efforts resulted in an upgraded application runtime environment as well as the automation and standardization of infrastructure, offering greater flexibility, scalability, and security of the solutions.
About Publink
Publink is a technology company that has been developing software for government offices since 2009, streamlining their daily operations—from managing budgets, to creating multi-year financial forecasts, to generating descriptive reports. The company’s applications are already used in almost half of the local government units in Poland. An important part of Publink’s operations is also the transfer of knowledge, including a series of webinars under the Publink Academy and the annual meeting of local government treasurers, SkarbON.
Challenges
Publink’s existing infrastructure was hosted as VPS or virtual machines, which required complex manual configuration and generated maintenance-related challenges. It lacked sufficient flexibility, hindering resource scaling in response to growing business needs and stalling the launch of new services and products. To ensure top quality of solutions delivered to their clients and facilitate resource estimation in the future, Publink decided to upgrade its environment.
Due to its competencies and experience in implementing Microsoft services, OChK became the main partner in the project. Experts decided that the best solution for Publink would be to build a landing zone. It enables rapid infrastructure deployment on the Microsoft Azure platform, reflects a systematic approach to cloud design and deployment, and leverages best architectural practices and patterns. As a result, the solution was expected to speed up the deployment cycle, increase flexibility, and allow infrastructure scaling in line with the organization’s growing needs.
Solution and implementation
OChK designed and implemented a landing zone tailored to Publink’s environment requirements and prepared code to standardize the infrastructure and deployment processes.
The OChK team helped select services to enhance the solution architecture and provided end-to-end support throughout the application and database migration process—from migration feasibility study through to migration and application launch in Azure.
During the project, the team opted against intermediate migration to virtual machines, given confirmed readiness of applications to run on PaaS (Platform as a Service).
The entire infrastructure was defined as code using Terraform, and the deployment processes—for both infrastructure and applications—were migrated and standardized in Azure DevOps.
Technologies used
To complete the project, the Microsoft Azure public cloud platform was used, within which the following services were activated:
App Service
Azure Function
Service Bus
Redis
Azure SQL
PostgreSQL Azure DevOps
Azure Migrate: Discovery and assessment tool
Azure SQL Migration Tool
Results
The two teams collaborated closely to develop secure standards for infrastructure and application deployment in Azure, and to modernize the application runtime environment.
The ability to quickly create new environments on demand enables Publink’s team to customize infrastructure to current business needs, ensuring the desired flexibility and scalability of solutions.
Standardization of infrastructure components reduced the time required to build new solutions, allowing Publink to focus on other business-critical tasks.
Automation of deployment processes minimized the risk of errors and significantly accelerated the configuration of new application environments.
At the same time, the implementation of state-of-the-art identity management technologies improved infrastructure security.
Our collaboration with OChK greatly accelerated our migration to the cloud. Thanks to OChK’s involvement, critical elements of the infrastructure were quickly put in place, but it was knowledge transfer that proved most valuable. Their team of experts effectively introduced us to the DevOps culture, enabling us to develop and manage more cloud projects on our own. OChK’s support not only enhanced the efficiency of our operations but also led to lasting improvements in the team’s capabilities.
Mateusz Rosiek
CTO, Publink
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