The Customer
SPS Commerce is a leader in retail cloud services that has recorded 84 consecutive quarters of growth. This Minneapolis-based company is a worldwide retail network using cloud technology to connect trading partners around the globe to optimize supply chain operations.
The Project
A Better Cloud Platform with Kubernetes
Overview
SPS Commerce engaged Improving to help them build a better cloud platform, broaden their cloud deployment options by implementing Kubernetes, and train their developers on these new technologies.
The Challenge
SPS works with more than 90,000 companies in retail, distribution, grocery and e-commerce, but to keep growing they needed to lower the barriers to deploying new applications on AWS or other future cloud providers. They knew Kubernetes would help them achieve this, but they needed a partner to coach their internal development team on DevOps principles and introduce them to Kubernetes best practices.
The Solution
Improving helped develop a Kubernetes-based, multi-team platform with a standard development process to shorten cycle times for new projects, reduce ramp-up time, and level up the team’s Kubernetes skills. We helped them build out the deployment pipeline, and created development and deployment standards. Using an Istio service mesh, we added transparent mutual TLS security between all services, as well as enabled powerful traffic routing features to support canary deployments and client-side load balancing.
The Business Benefits
With the simplified deployment interface, the majority of teams can plug and play, and get code up and running with little overhead. Having Kubernetes gives SPS Commerce flexibility and helps avoid cloud vendor lock-in if they need to choose new cloud providers in the future. With the Istio service mesh, all traffic is encrypted between applications, providing out-of-the-box security and authentication.
Why Improving?
Improving consultants provide both deep experience with implementing Kubernetes for companies, as well as a high-level approach oriented towards achieving an organization’s business objectives. We don’t just migrate to a new technology, we transform the development process and help your application developers deliver software effectively and efficiently. And in all things, we have the training expertise needed to level up the internal team so that Improving can leave the team in a better place and better prepared for future challenges.
Get Started
Learn more about how Improving can help you get started by contacting us today at sales@improving.com or filling out a contact form through the link below.
