Case study
ProSoft Technology, which specializes in communication solutions for industrial automation and control, built its ProSoft Connect cloud platform on Amazon EKS with Nirmata and launched it in record time.
Challenge
ProSoft Technology specializes in communication solutions for industrial automation and control applications. From manufacturing plants, foundries and mines to oil wells, pipelines, and water treatment plants, ProSoft hardware and software enables disparate industrial systems to interoperate, and allows skilled technicians to remotely monitor and manage these systems in mission-critical environments where a failure can disrupt production and even endanger lives.
With the rise of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0, “our customers are looking for ways they can leverage the IIoT to reduce costs and increase productivity – without compromising safety and security or adding complexity,” notes Daniel Wade, Vice President of Engineering. ProSoft needed a faster, easier way to develop and deliver new protocols, processes, and technologies for industrial customers:
“Throughout the development process, Nirmata has been an excellent partner for us. Most vendors focus on the specific issue you’re trying to solve, but the Nirmata team helped us look at the broader picture.”
Solution
The team selected AWS for their cloud infrastructure because of its global presence and the breadth of its services. They decided to package their microservices in containers and deploy them on Amazon EKS, and they needed a lightweight platform to help them deploy and securely manage their applications as well as their Kubernetes infrastructure.
After a two-month pilot, Nirmata became a core element in ProSoft Technology’s stack, delivering policy-based automation for deploying, operating and optimizing the platform across both public and private cloud environments. The team automated cluster creation using Nirmata and started using Amazon S3 and Amazon Elastic Container Registry.
For the back end of the new ProSoft Connect platform, Wade and his team concluded that building it internally with a cloud-native microservices and container architecture would offer the best flexibility for adding services as customers’ needs evolve. Support for both cloud and on-premises deployments was important, since many ProSoft customers prefer to manage critical devices on local networks.
“We looked at available solutions, and none compared to Nirmata in flexibility and capabilities for application lifecycle management for mission-critical systems.” – Daniel Wade
Results
ProSoft’s new cloud service strategically positions the company for continued growth. For customers, the platform offers a centralized management tool that increases the connectivity and strategic value of ProSoft’s existing products. It bolsters security with a redundant VPN tunnel service and the elimination of potentially vulnerable user-installed software, and users can begin to troubleshoot malfunctioning connected devices immediately as additional services spin up in seconds and scale down when demand falls.
For the ProSoft development team, the microservices architecture saves time. Containerized services make it easy to isolate problems and prevent issues from cascading, and the team uses containers on Amazon EKS clusters to simulate how new devices will work and to stress test the platform quickly and cost-effectively.
“We depend on them to deliver a solid container management platform to deploy and manage our cloud based service, but they’ve also been a trusted advisor, helping us navigate challenges in delivering a secure, resilient and scalable cloud-native application. As a result our team was able to launch ProSoft Connect in record time.” – Daniel Wade
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