Azure - Real Estate Client

Industry: Real Estate

Azure - Real Estate Client

Posted by Encora on May 24, 2023 12:27:24 PM

Encora’s approach drove significant improvements across the client’s eCommerce KPI dashboard.

Industry Context

The client provides facilities management and procurement solutions for retail, financial services, logistics, and healthcare sectors. The client wanted the flexibility to utilize some features of the client’s flagship facilities management product rather than the entire product suite and integrate with their existing ERP suite. This helps them to select the best-in-breed tools that suit their needs. The level of customizations expected by the clients is on the raise and this necessitated the need to have the tools in place which will facilitate the client to develop, test and deliver software changes at speed with quality.

Client Challenge

Migrate from on-premise to cloud
Onboarding a new customer needs a minimum of 4 to 6 weeks and with such a long onboarding time it was becoming increasingly difficult to cater to new business needs
Unable to dynamically scale the compute to handle seasonal spikes
The on-prem infrastructure was provisioned for the peak load resulting in high cost
Non-Prod ecosystem (Dev, QA, UAT & Regression) doesn’t mirror the Prod ecosystem resulting in surprises during the release
Rudimentary DevOPS pipeline/infrastructure resulting in dependence on the “Release Management” team to promote the code even to the non-prod ecosystem
New version releases were like an event with the entire engineering team joining the bridge and validating their deliverables on release night
Lack of support for ultra-high availability

Approach

Envision: Product Management, understand client’s cloud migration needs, and prepare a detailed cloud migration roadmap. Responsibilities include Release planning, product backlog management & UAT support
Enable: Cloud Services, migrating on-premise facility source ecosystem to Azure. Platform Modernization, reengineer the code to utilize Azure PaaS offerings like Azure Keyvault, Azure Service Bus, etc
Engineer: Product Engineering & Development, prepare target cloud blueprint, identify components that are to be reengineered for cloud, and perform the required PoC. Reengineer the code to utilize Cloud PaaS offerings. DevOps, built the DevOps toolchain, scripted the infrastructure, and bridged the gap between Nonprod & Prod ecosystem ensuring seamless delivery to all Non-Prod & Prod servers. Quality Assurance, created the smoke, regression automation test suites and integrated them with the DevOps pipeline
Engage: Digital Experience, reengineering existing product suite to rich UI using Bootstrap, Angular

Why Azure?

FMPilot product was built on .Net stack and Azure was the natural cloud choice
Encora is instrumental in building & managing the FMPilot ecosystem for the last 10+ years. Encora also has the required prior expertise in reengineering, migrating a large scale on-prem monolith enterprise product to cloud

AWS Solution

Utilized Azure DevOps pipeline, Infrastructure as Code to maintain a standard infrastructure across environments (Dev, QA, UAT, Regression & Production)
Use of Azure Key Vault to manage application secrets, configs
Use of Azure Active Directory to enable two-factor authentication
Utilized VM Scale sets to dynamically scale the compute to handle preventive maintenance workloads, seasonal spikes.
Deployed the product across regions to support ultra-high availability
Real time monitoring of the product ecosystem using Azure Application Insights, Azure Monitor

Primary Azure Services: VM Scale Sets, Azure Active Directory, Azure Service Bus, Azure Load Balancer, Azure Front Door, Azure Key Vault, Azure Blob Storage, Send Grid, SQL over VM, Azure Monitor, Azure Application Insights