Case
Fibia
Case
Fibia
THE SOLUTION
Fibia saw an increasing number of services and a growth in traffic on its integration platform and wholesale platform. They already had a high-availability setup with dual-nodes and traditional deployment, which works well, but to accommodate growth and their desire for more flexibility, it was time to make a technological shift.
Various alternatives were jointly assessed and the process ended with a decision to move Fibia's infrastructure to Container technology with Kubernetes as the orchestration platform.
Container technology involves packaging your application, which in this case are microservices, into a so-called "container". This container consists of both the operating system and the application and it is an industry standard because it has a well-defined interface between the container and the runtime environment. This means that the application can run anywhere. The interface between the runtime environment and the Container means that applications are separated from the environment itself, making it easy to move applications.
Kubernetes is an orchestration platform that manages all the containers. It ensures, for example, that enough of each container is always running to accommodate traffic and high-availability requirements. It also distributes containers across the different servers that are part of the Kubernetes cluster to ensure that if one server goes down, the system can still run.
Kubernetes also has a number of smart features in relation to deployment, where it can upgrade to new versions or roll back to previous versions of Containers without any downtime.
With the new infrastructure on Container technology, Fibia has a very flexible setup. If a server goes down, everything is handled automatically and if more performance is needed, then it's easy to add more servers to the Kubernetes cluster without having to make any other configuration changes. Kubernetes is also self-healing and handles load balancing, thus ensuring great robustness.
Fibre company Fibia is owned by NRGi (one of Denmark’s largest energy companies, with more than 1,100 employees and just over 210,000 shareholders) and ANDEL (Denmark’s largest cooperative energy and fibre network group with 400,000 customers and shareholders). Fibia has taken over ownership of Waoo from 7 February 2023.
Fibia is among Denmark’s largest companies and has installed fibre networks on large parts of Zealand, the islands and Eastern Jutland. The company supplies fibre networks to more than 550,000 households and businesses and has over 250,000 customers.
Fibia was experiencing increasing traffic and more and more microservices were continuously being added to the platform, which meant that they would hit the limits for the performance available in the previous setup.
They wanted to be able to easily scale with additional performance and more flexibility in deployment. In addition, Fibia wanted it to be possible to go to the cloud with the systems if they wanted to do so at a later date.
The solution was to wrap all microservices in containers and use Kubernetes as the orchestration layer. In addition, Ansible is used for all environment specifications, making it easy to change or add servers to the environments and ensuring that all machines meet the desired state configuration.
The orchestration of containers is done through Kubernetes. Kubernetes ensures that applications are spread across all active servers, which ensures robustness. Kubernetes also monitors the servers and ensures that a fixed number of applications are running.
Fibia now has a very flexible and robust infrastructure for its service and wholesale platform, with three main benefits:
Scalability: Kubernetes, together with Docker containers, handles dynamic individual scaling of microservices to meet needs. It is also easy to add more servers to the Kubernetes cluster to handle more traffic and more services.
Robustness: Kubernetes is self-healing and if a server or service goes down, it is handled automatically.
Deployment: It has become easier to upgrade/downgrade microservices. In Kubernetes, you can have multiple versions of the same microservice. This way, you can test a subset of traffic on the new version to make sure everything is running smoothly before it replaces the previous version.
”With the growth of our integration platform and wholesale platform, it was time to update our infrastructure and the choice fell on Container technology with Kubernetes and Docker. With Novataris, we have a partner that delivers high quality and focuses on our business goals.”
Hanne Elkjær, CIO