Containerization and Kubernetes orchestration

Context and customer needs

Aware of the major benefits brought by containerizing applications, the technical management of the WEKA group turned to Enix for support in its migration to Cloud Native technologies.

The objectives set out by the IT department, justifying the transition to Docker containers and Kubernetes orchestration, were the following:

Agility and speed: gains in efficiency across development cycles
Velocity: reducing time to production for new versions and features
Cost control: optimizing resource usage

The WEKA group

The WEKA Group is today among the top 50 global players in publishing. It specializes in professional information and regulatory documentation.

Of German origin, the group established itself in France in 1979 with the creation of Editions WEKA and today comprises 23 operating companies, 6 of them in France (Editions WEKA, Editions Techniques de l’Ingénieur, Editions Tissot, Comundi, CMT, Lexagri/Agrobase). The group has developed around 4 B2B areas of expertise: legal and technical databases, professional training, consulting, and online services.

" Following Enix’s intervention, the WEKA group confidently began its Cloud Native shift with the containerization of its applications and Kubernetes orchestration. "

Eric Wallet, Head of Product IT & Internal IT

Enix's support and solutions

Enix offered WEKA comprehensive support across several phases:

Training
We delivered 2 multi-day training sessions on Docker and Kubernetes at WEKA’s premises.
Containerization support
With an on-site workshop, Enix helped containerize several types of applications with Docker (Apache/PHP, Java…) and then produced reference procedures so WEKA could become autonomous for the following ones.
Kubernetes installation and go-live
Whether hosted by a Cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba, OVH…), on-premise, or in our own datacenters, one of Enix’s strengths is our ability to adapt to a wide variety of infrastructures.
For WEKA, we installed and commissioned 2 Kubernetes clusters (development and production) on their on-premise VMware platform. We then supported the technical teams in deploying their previously containerized applications onto them.
Consulting and support
Since the rollout of these new containerization and Kubernetes methods, Enix has provided support for cluster maintenance and updates.
Through modern communication tools (i.e. Slack) we are in permanent contact with the technical teams, advising them on operational management and the rollout of new features.
This close relationship later allowed us to step in on other topics where our sysadmin and DevOps expertise is useful to WEKA, such as setting up high-availability clusters for MariaDB and PostgreSQL databases.

Results!

WEKA now runs the vast majority of its web applications on this Cloud Native infrastructure. Developers have gained autonomy in production releases. On the operational side, capacity planning has been simplified, and the concepts inherent to Kubernetes (self-healing through reconciliation loops toward the desired state) have improved resilience and increased availability.

Through significant resource pooling, the IT resources (servers, memory, CPU) required to run the applications have also dropped considerably. This has allowed WEKA to remobilize its resources and efforts toward its core business.

32 32 applications already successfully migrated to Kubernetes

5% 5% improvement in average response time

99,98% 99.98% application availability rate

The essentials

Our solution