Proximus is the largest Belgian telecom operator, offering quadruple play services (fixed, mobile, ISP, TV) to consumers and a full enterprise services portfolio to business.
The telecom operator was in need of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that provides flexibility, more resilience and speed in application deployment, service deployment and infrastructure demands. And this to better address their business needs with shorter time-to-market and more agility.
the challenge.
Proximus’ internal development department expected faster delivery of infrastructure components. In addition, they wanted more flexibility in terms of application and infrastructure architecture. The infrastructure components in place at the time did not manage to meet those demands, resulting in customers looking at public cloud solutions instead of internally supported ones that were certified by the internal security team.
“In order to offer a better service to their customers, the application servers team was looking at potential solutions to serve containers to both ensure flexibility to the developers as well as assurance towards security and infrastructure teams that everything would meet the requirements set out by those teams”, says Vincent Brobald, senior open source consultant at Devoteam.
Red Hat Forum, Brussels, 2019.
the solution.
Devoteam deployed OpenShift PaaS on private OpenStack cloud, managed from a central team and deployed to the entire organisation. “This provides full CI-CD pipeline automation on private cloud with the possibility for future extension to any public cloud, to gain more elasticity to handle unexpected loads”, adds Vincent Brobald. “We provided guidance to several development teams.”
The OpenShift PaaS set-up enables infrastructure teams to structure a standard operating environment on which developers can develop their services. This project was built in close collaboration with Red Hat as a Premier Business Partner.
“We held assessment meetings with the different stakeholders and impacted parties to gather and consolidate their requirements and expectations”, Vincent Brobald explains. “Following this assessment, we defined the implementation approach, both technically and organisationally. We set up Proof of Concepts with several departments to validate the solution.”
Devoteam also deployed a container security platform on top of OpenShift to ensure the security team was able to put policies in place while giving developers and infrastructure teams the necessary visibility towards vulnerabilities and their potential fixes.
Proximus towers, Brussels.
main benefits.
“The project allowed Proximus to gain agility, more resilience and speed in app & service deployment and infrastructure demands. The client benefits from the uniformisation of software production and shorter time-to-market.”
- Standard & open operation environment to drive software innovations
- Fully built-in CI/CD capabilities with automated deployments based on automated testing
- Lightweight release management due to up-front defined boundaries
- Fully auto-scalable infrastructure with option to scale to various public clouds using the same containers as internally