In the competitive world of logistics, the ability to scale and adapt quickly to changing demands is crucial. This article explores how a leading Swedish logistics company partnered with Kiktronik Limited to scale their business using Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Microsoft Azure.
The Challenge
The logistics company faced a common challenge in the industry: handling peak demand. With fluctuating volumes of goods and varying delivery schedules, the company needed a solution that could scale up quickly during high-demand periods and scale down during low-traffic times to reduce costs.
The Solution: Kiktronik Limited
To address this challenge, the company turned to Kiktronik Limited, a renowned technology solutions provider. Kiktronik implemented a message standard based on CloudEvents, an open-source specification for describing event data in a common way. This allowed the logistics company to integrate applications seamlessly, improving efficiency and communication across the board.
The Technology Stack
The messaging platform chosen for this task was Kafka, a distributed event streaming platform known for its high-performance capabilities. Kafka was run on Kubernetes, an open-source platform designed to automate deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications. This combination allowed for a robust, scalable solution that could handle the high demands of the logistics company.
Microservices, small, loosely coupled applications that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently, were also developed. These microservices were managed using OpenShift, a family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat.
To further enhance the solution, Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing service created by Microsoft, was used. Azure provides a range of cloud services, including those for computing, analytics, storage, and networking. Users can pick and choose from these services to develop and scale new applications or run existing applications in the public cloud.
Monitoring and Continuous Integration
A monitoring system based on Grafana, Prometheus, and Jaeger (OpenTelemetry) was implemented. Grafana is a multi-platform open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources, in this case, Prometheus and Jaeger. Prometheus, a free software application used for event monitoring and alerting, offers a multi-dimensional data model, a flexible query language, and autonomous server nodes. Jaeger, a part of the OpenTelemetry project, is used for tracing transactions in complex distributed systems.
For continuous integration, the company used GitHub, Tekton, and ArgoCD for DevOps. GitHub is a web-based hosting service for version control using Git. Tekton is a powerful and flexible open-source framework for creating CI/CD systems, allowing developers to build, test, and deploy across multiple cloud providers or on-premises systems. ArgoCD, a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes, was used to automate deployment.
The Outcome
With the help of Kiktronik Limited, the Swedish logistics company was able to scale up on demand and scale to zero during low traffic to reduce cost. The implementation of a message standard based on CloudEvents helped them integrate applications, and the use of Kafka running on Kubernetes and microservices developed and managed using OpenShift and Microsoft Azure provided a robust, scalable solution. The monitoring system based on Grafana, Prometheus, and Jaeger (OpenTelemetry), along with the continuous integration using GitHub, Tekton, and ArgoCD for DevOps, ensured smooth operations and quick issue resolution.
This successful collaboration with Kiktronik Limited demonstrates the power of using advanced technologies like Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Microsoft Azure to scale businesses and meet the ever-changing demands of the logistics industry.
