Recognizing the growing potential of GenAI, the company now sought to use automation and AI to enhance the speed and efficiency of its customer service. This technology would help ActiUp maintain its high level of service and offer unmatched convenience, even as the number of events and their customer base grew.

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As the company’s customer base rapidly grew and user demand spiked prior to events, it urgently needed a scalable, dynamic and adaptable infrastructure that could handle peak loads.

The post Ticket To Success: Seamless Scaling With App Modernization For An Event Platform appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

The creators of RoboWorld aim to capture the imaginations of billions of players as they bring their games to the global market. With exciting gameplay, a new reality experience with cutting-edge AR technology, ownership of in-game items via NFTs, and a recommendation system-based Marketplace, the agile startup is on the cusp of something big.

Challenge: Managing growth and scale with a cost-effective solution

The RoboWorld team was looking to offer an unparalleled gaming experience to global gamers. The augmented reality-backed immersive gameplay had to be seamless and scalable. In preparation for rapid growth and agility, the team also needed a cost-effective cloud solution that was easy to set up and easy to monitor.

“Our vision for the future of blockchain gaming is to create a reality-based, decentralized assets strategy card game that delivers an unparalleled gaming experience. With the help of augmented reality and a global player base, we aim to build a unique universe where players can battle opponents and interact with audiences, creating a dynamic advertising platform that can promote brands and distribute news in a real environment surrounding the game,” says Louis Le, CTO, RoboWorld

Solution: Unlocking a world of options with GKE to build agility & responsiveness

In consultation with the Cloud Kinetics’ team of cloud experts, the team evaluated options. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) emerged as the frontrunner with its flexible pricing model and competitive offering. The sustained-use and committed-use discounts that GCP offered would help them see reduced costs over time, a compelling choice for an early-stage startup, according to the game’s creators.

What’s more, the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) allowed for a seamless move from on-premise to the cloud and was also easy to set up. GKE also promised to reduce the requirement for ongoing manual maintenance of the master cluster and scaling of nodes. All in all, this would make for a more efficient and convenient user experience and help them deliver on their vision.

We partnered with Cloud Kinetics to help us onboard and optimize our usage of Google Cloud Platform (GCP). With Cloud Kinetics’ expertise, we were able to navigate the complex GCP environment and quickly get up to speed with the latest best practices. Louis Le, CTO, RoboWorld

Outcome: Accelerated time to market and boost to player engagement

With a global audience for the game, the team anticipated the need for efficiently handling spikes and troughs in usage. Using GKE helped enable:

• Stability and reliability
• High availability across multiple zones
• Ability to handle troughs and spikes in player usage
• Auto-scaling when needed
• Tools for easy monitoring

Cloud Kinetics has been working closely with the RoboWorld team to tap the full benefits of Google Cloud, as they revolutionize the gaming industry and build a shared experience that blurs the lines between reality and gaming.

On the experience so far, the CTO of team RoboWorld says, “We partnered with Cloud Kinetics to help us onboard and optimize our usage of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) through a grant program. With Cloud Kinetics’ expertise, we were able to navigate the complex GCP environment and quickly get up to speed with the latest best practices.”

“The Cloud Kinetics team helped us develop a customized solution that met our specific needs and ensured we were able to take full advantage of the GCP grant. Their guidance and support throughout the process were invaluable, allowing us to optimize our usage of GCP and accelerate our time to market. Overall, Cloud Kinetics was an instrumental partner in our successful GCP implementation and optimization.” Louis Le added.

Partnering for future growth and next-gen gaming

Google Cloud’s suite of products and services like Cloud Spanner will play a key role in helping the company scale up and optimize its gaming platform. For instance, Cloud Spanner’s scalable, fully managed relational database service, will help keep the game running seamlessly and smoothly as the player base expands and newer features get added to the gaming experience. The team also plans to leverage Google Cloud’s AI and machine learning capabilities to bring an unprecedented degree of personalization for players, increasing engagement and enhancing the RoboWorld game experience.

They are also keen to explore Google Cloud’s Internet of Things (IoT) services to help capture and analyze data from connected devices.

A spate of exciting events is planned in the lead-up to the official launch of RoboWorld. This includes a Pre-Alpha test for their communities, a Public boxes sale with support from ImmutableX in March, and the official game launch later in the year. The right cloud environment and cloud operations support will help strengthen the company as they gear up for these.

The post Storming The Gaming World With Google Kubernetes Engine appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

True, every step of a CI/CD pipeline can be executed manually, but it is automation that shows its true value. Meanwhile, pipelines are predefined tasks that decide what needs to be completed and when. Tasks are usually executed in parallel to accelerate delivery. A typical CI/CD pipeline includes stages where code is pushed to the repository and stored, code changes trigger the build, which is tested and then deployed to the production environment.

Enabling CI/CD pipeline for container-based workloads

• CI/CD, a DevOps strategy: CI/CD is a DevOps tactic, in fact it is the backbone of the DevOps methodology, which brings together developers and IT operations teams to deploy software. CI/CD facilitates DevOps teams with a single repository to keep automation tools and store work so that the code can be continuously integrated and tested for quality.
• Containerization, a DevOps tool: In containerization, all the components of an application – the software, its environment, dependencies and configuration – are bundled into a single isolated unit called a container. Each unit can be deployed in its own space on a shared operating system, on any computing environment, on-premise or on the cloud. Containers are lightweight and portable, and very conducive to automation. Containers and orchestration tools facilitate CI and CD.
• Docker, a containerization solution: Docker is a containerization solution used widely in DevOps and workflows. It is an open source platform that allows developers to quickly and easily build, deploy, update, run and manage containers. Docker makes it easy to decouple apps from their surroundings and it also contains a collection of container images that can be used for development.

Common use cases for containerization workloads

• Modernizing legacy application development practices to container-based platforms
• Moving pipelines and workflows across multiple microservices and applications with ease
• Providing DevOps support for CI/CD
• DevOps enables compliance with industry standards and organizational policies while shipping releases faster to production.
• Minimizing errors during the build, deploy, test, and release process of a new software release
• Providing easier deployment of repetitive tasks. 

CI/CD pipeline architecture

DevOps with containers: The workflow

1. After coding, developers push the code to a shared repository such as GitHub. Frequently merging the code and validating it is one way to ensure CI is error-free. To start the process, a GitHub webhook triggers a Jenkins project build. When code changes are made and committed to the repository, the pipeline gets activated. It downloads the code and triggers a build process. 
2. In this step, the code is compiled, artifacts are built, dependencies are sorted out and stored in the repository. Environments are created, containers are built and images are stored for roll out. This is followed by the testing processes. The Jenkins build job uses a dynamic build agent in AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to perform a container build process.
3. A container image is created from the code in source control and is then pushed to an AWS/Docker Container Registry. 
4. Using the process of CD, Jenkins deploys an updated container image to the Kubernetes cluster.
5. The web application uses Dynamo DB as its back end. Both Dynamo DB and AWS EKS report metrics to the AWS Monitor.
6. A Grafana instance provides visual dashboards of the application performance based on the data from AWS Monitor.

Containerization infrastructure and configuration as code

The true power of containers becomes visible when orchestrating with Kubernetes and DevOps pipelines can be automated in better ways. Kubernetes is a portable open source platform used to manage containerized workloads and services. It facilitates both automation and declarative configuration. YAML, a data-serialization language frequently used for writing configuration files, is utilised in Kubernetes deployments and resources. Its advantage is that YAML files can be created and stored in a Git repository and all changes can be tracked and audited. 

• Continuous deployment pipeline with no downtime: The objective of the pipeline is to perform a set of tasks that will deploy a fully tested and functional service or application to production. The need for frequent deployments is handled best by Kubernetes via its container orchestration mechanism.
• Easy rollbacks: The Kubernetes framework has  a built-in rollback mechanism. When new code is ready to be pushed to a container, the new desired state is defined, and Kubernetes orchestrates creating new containers and removing existing ones. If a problem arises, the immutable nature of Kubernetes containers allows easy rollbacks to the previous state.
• On-demand infrastructure: Kubernetes, through the use of the configurations, can easily scale infrastructure up and down based on the resources needed to handle the workloads of the application. And it is elastic by nature.
• Run everywhere pipelines: With Kubernetes architecture, we can easily migrate Containers and pipelines to anywhere in the same cloud or all on-premises.

Containerization features

• Availability: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)  operates and scales the Kubernetes control plane across many AWS availability zones to offer high availability. As part of the Amazon Kubernetes Service cluster, application traffic is distributed to one or more containers (pods) that run the application as individual microservices. This approach to running containerized applications in Kubernetes provides a highly available infrastructure for the applications.
• Scalability: Amazon EKS makes it easy to run Kubernetes on AWS and on-premises. It automatically allows scaling of the number of cluster’s worker nodes to meet the application’s workload demands. As the application size increases, the EKS cluster can scale up the number of Kubernetes nodes.
• Resiliency: Amazon EKS is built into the Kubernetes architecture and its components are resilient by nature. Kubernetes components monitor and restart the containers (pods) if there is any issue. Combined with running multiple Kubernetes nodes, applications can tolerate a pod or node being unavailable.

Security and security threats in containers

Container security is an important part of a complete security assessment. It involves the practice of protecting the containerized environment and applications from potential risks and threats by implementing a combination of security policies and tools.

• Access and authorization exploits: Providing access to authorized users and blocking all other users accessing the platform. And encrypting K8’s configuration files (for example, web. config and appsettings.json), particularly in a containerized setup.
• Container image vulnerabilities: Security mechanism to prevent malicious attacks is the key.

Detecting code vulnerabilities, outdated packages, malicious code, and other harmful threats during the build stage can improve security dramatically. 

Monitoring CI/CD pipelines, end-to-end

• Monitor health of the CI/CD build pipeline and set up cognitive, proactive alerts spanning various tools
• Assess performance and quality of deployments in a unified way across multiple tools
• Monitoring the pipeline performance and reporting issues combines Amazon Monitoring Service (CloudWatch) with Grafana for visual dashboards; or extending build pipeline monitoring to include application monitoring (Nagios) and container monitoring (Kubernetes).

The post CI/CD Pipeline For <br>Container-Based Workloads: <br>A DevOps Strategy appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

The Internet – and bandwidth availability – have become essential services; without them, businesses and government agencies cannot function. It’s even more challenging in large and growing economies like Indonesia, which comprises 17,000 islands and 273 million people, the bulk of whom are just about coming online for work and play.

The only feasible option was to leverage the cloud.

“An organization of our scale needed a robust ICT infrastructure for our business. But our legacy systems were unable to cope with the rapid rise in demand across the vast geography. We needed a solution that could be available anywhere, anytime, and on any connected device. We also needed expertise to help us transition,” the CIO said.

The agency assessed all the available solutions and finally picked the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on Google Cloud. The agency’s IT experts were satisfied that they would be able to start quickly with single-click clusters and scale up to 15,000 nodes. Apps development could be speeded up without sacrificing data and cybersecurity. They just needed an implementer to get them started.

That’s where Cloud Kinetics came in. Cloud Kinetics set up a secure, high-speed infrastructure on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and optimized the agency’s apps, workloads and processes on GKE. Security and budget were of critical importance.

“We built a high-speed, powerful infrastructure that could scale up to meet the rising infrastructure demands of the client while keeping costs under control,” Ted A, Cloud Kinetics’ Chief Revenue Officer, said. “We helped host their applications, their database clusters, legacy workloads, tools, web content, backups, and static files.”

Why GCP?

GCP allows businesses to run apps wherever they are needed. With the combined commitment of GCP and Cloud Kinetics to open source, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud platforms, vendor lock-in can be avoided. Companies can run their workloads on any cloud or environment. GCP open cloud solutions provide consistency between public and private clouds, helping businesses modernize and deploy apps faster.

GCP can be used to develop a variety of apps with support for stateful, serverless, and application accelerators.

“We could also use continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools to secure and speed up each stage of the app lifecycle. Application development can be speeded up without sacrificing security,” said Ted

Why Cloud Kinetics?

Cloud Kinetics is a premier GCP managed services provider (MSP). The Cloud Kinetics team in Indonesia, and outside, has the capabilities, the certifications, and the talent to migrate, manage and maintain a range of services and solutions for the funding agency.

The Indonesian market: View forward

Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country with a huge population of Internet users. It is a hot spot for global tech companies keen to get into one of Asia’s fastest-growing data markets. The country’s trend toward data localization is a major draw. Google has been offering services such as data storage, security and big data analytics to institutional and individual customers in Indonesia using data centres of local partners. The shift now gives customers faster service, which end-users like banks can use to serve its customers.

The post How A Funding Agency Met Rising Customer Demands With Scalable Cloud Infrastructure appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform. It enables the operation of a flexible web server framework for cloud applications. It also automates many manual processes involved in deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications.

Kubernetes allows organizations to orchestrate containers. Either you can set up core on-prem Kubernetes for your workloads, or you can use the managed Kubernetes engines from major cloud vendors. You can also deploy your workloads on a hybrid Kubernetes model by extending on-prem to cloud and multi-cloud Kubernetes environments.

Professional Kubernetes Services

Kubernetes drives the container orchestration and management of micro-services. Cloud Kinetics helps enterprises to modernize their legacy apps and build cloud-native and serverless applications by automating deployments using CI/CD and security configurations.

• Application Modernization
• Cloud-Native Solutions
• DevSecOps
• Cloud-Native and Microservices Applications

Professional Services Offerings

• Consult & Assess
• Architect & Design
• Implement & Migrate

Managed Services Offerings

• Maintenance & Support
• Platform Support
• Cluster Management
• Capacity Management
• Security & Monitoring

Customized Training

Cloud Kinetics Learning (CKL) offers lab activities for Kubernetes and contextualizes them for your organization’s environment. We recreate your environment and mirror your implementation as close as possible in the lab. CKL also offers customized tech training for your staff to appreciate Kubernetes insights. Customized or standard courses are delivered via virtual or on-prem or stand-alone lab activities.

Plug and Play Offerings

Most enterprises seek to leverage their public cloud capabilities. In this journey, they need to make several decisions. For example, they must decide whether a public or a private cloud is ideal for them. And which cloud services and technologies they should deploy. And how to extend their workloads from on-prem model to specific clouds or multiple clouds.

With Cloud Kinetics’ hybrid and multi-cloud Kubernetes solution, we help customers to adopt the right hybrid or multi-cloud strategy aligned with their business needs.

Why Kubernetes

It is an open-source solution that

• Allows to orchestrate containers.
• Makes it easy to manage application deployments and updates.
• Automates application deployments.
• Manages workloads on the fly by auto-scaling containerized applications.
• Make efficient use of resources needed to run enterprise applications.
• Brings in DevOps efficiency.
• Makes monitoring, health-check, and managing more straightforward.
• Helps mount and add storage to run stateful apps.
• Offers hybrid and multi-cloud flexibility.
• Self-heals your application with replica sets, auto-placement, auto-restart, auto replication, and autoscaling.

Why work with Cloud Kinetics

Cloud Kinetics is a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP) offering Kubernetes support, consulting, professional services and training for organizations embarking on their Kubernetes journey. We will work with you to determine your key needs and help you with:

• Overall architectural objectives and approach
• Kubernetes setup, provisioning and planning
• Security requirements considerations
• Software delivery pipeline design
• Implementation process analysis & planning
• Supporting tooling review

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