Digital transformation is not just about adopting new technologies; it’s a holistic approach that involves rethinking business processes, customer experiences, and organizational culture. It’s about leveraging digital technologies to create new opportunities, optimize operations, and deliver value to customers in innovative ways.  

Using the lens of digital assurance and digital engineering, we hope to further illuminate the idea of digital transformation in this blog. The blog will specifically emphasize digital engineering and assurance while highlighting their role in digital transformation. 

Let’s begin! 

The Importance of Digital Transformation 

The importance of digital transformation in today’s business landscape cannot be overstated. Here are some key reasons why enterprises must prioritize digital transformation to stay relevant and competitive: 

• Resilience: The pandemic has highlighted the need for businesses to be resilient and adaptable to changing circumstances. Digital transformation enables enterprises to build agility into their operations, processes, and customer interactions, making them better equipped to navigate disruptions and uncertainties. Example: During the pandemic, many companies had to adapt their business models to survive. Restaurants that implemented online ordering and delivery services were more resilient than those that didn’t, as they were able to continue serving customers even during lockdowns. 

• Customer-centricity: Customers today demand seamless, personalized, and digital experiences. Digital transformation allows enterprises to leverage data, analytics, and automation to understand customer needs, preferences, and behaviors, and deliver hyper-personalized experiences that drive customer loyalty and retention. For Example: Amazon is known for its hyper-personalized customer experiences, with personalized recommendations based on purchase history and browsing behavior. This helps drive customer loyalty and retention, as customers feel understood and appreciated by the brand. 

• Innovation: Digital transformation fosters a culture of innovation within organizations, empowering employees to think creatively, experiment with new ideas, and drive continuous improvement. It enables enterprises to explore new business models, revenue streams, and markets, unlocking new growth opportunities. Tesla is known for disrupting the traditional automotive industry by introducing electric cars and self-driving technology. This innovation has enabled them to capture a significant share of the luxury car market and expand into other markets like energy storage.  

• Efficiency: Digital transformation streamlines operations, automates repetitive tasks, and eliminates manual errors, resulting in improved operational efficiency and cost savings. It enables enterprises to optimize their processes, reduce overheads, and enhance productivity, driving better business outcomes. Banks have embraced digital transformation to improve efficiency in their operations. For example, many banks now offer mobile banking apps that allow customers to deposit checks, transfer funds, and pay bills without visiting a physical branch, saving both time and money for both the bank and the customer.  

• Competitive Advantage: In today’s hyper-competitive business landscape, digital transformation is no longer optional; it’s a strategic imperative. Enterprises that embrace digital transformation gain a competitive edge by staying ahead of the curve, adapting to market changes faster, and delivering superior customer experiences. Example: Netflix disrupted the traditional TV and movie industry by introducing a subscription-based streaming service that offers personalized recommendations and original content. This has allowed them to gain a competitive advantage over traditional cable and satellite TV providers, as they are able to offer more value to their customers at a lower cost. 

Read our success story on Implementing Critical and Inclusive Testing Methods To Accelerate The App Development Lifecycle For Complex Retail Applications. 

Definition of Digital Assurance and its effects 

In layman’s words, digital assurance is a collection of QA (Quality Assurance) practices that guarantee seamless communication between various digital ecosystem components. Digital ecosystems include cloud computing, online analytical processing, and even social networking. 

Data management and data systems are also essential components of any digital ecosystem. Effective data management involves collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing data in a secure and organized manner. Digital ecosystems generate vast amounts of data, and having the right data systems in place ensures that businesses can effectively use this data to make informed decisions and drive growth.  

For example, online retailers like Amazon use data systems to track customer behavior and purchase history, allowing them to provide personalized recommendations and offers. Another example is healthcare organizations that use data management systems to store and analyze patient data to improve diagnoses and treatment plans. In both cases, effective data management and systems play a critical role in optimizing digital ecosystems and driving business outcomes. 

How Digital Assurance Helps in Digital Transformation? 

Digital Assurance plays a crucial role in supporting successful digital transformation initiatives for enterprises. As organizations strive to embrace new technologies, processes, and business models, Digital Assurance provides a comprehensive framework to ensure that the digital assets are reliable, secure, and aligned with the desired objectives. Here are some ways in which Digital Assurance helps in driving digital transformation: 

• Digital Assurance ensures the quality and reliability of digital solutions. Through comprehensive testing and validation, Digital Assurance identifies and addresses potential issues, bugs, or vulnerabilities in digital assets, thereby minimizing risks of system failures, security breaches, or customer dissatisfaction. By ensuring that digital solutions are functioning optimally, Digital Assurance enables organizations to deliver seamless, user-friendly experiences to customers, employees, and other stakeholders, fostering their adoption and engagement with digital technologies. 
• Digital Assurance promotes innovation and agility in the digital transformation journey. By continuously testing and validating digital assets, organizations can identify opportunities for improvement, innovation, and optimization.  
• Digital Assurance allows for rapid iterations, testing of new features or functionalities, and experimentation with emerging technologies, enabling organizations to stay agile and adaptive in the dynamic digital landscape. This helps organizations to respond quickly to changing customer needs, market trends, and business requirements, and stay ahead of the competition. 

Digital Engineering: Definition & Its Impact 

Digital engineering is a comprehensive approach to design that utilizes models and data instead of documentation. This technique involves integrating data across various models and transforming the culture of project teams. By doing so, digital engineering can significantly reduce the risk associated with building costs and timelines. 

How Digital Engineering Helps In Digital Transformation? 

It goes beyond traditional software development, focusing on building robust, scalable, and innovative digital assets that drive business outcomes. Here are some key reasons why Digital Engineering is vital to digital transformation: 

• Digital Engineering is a powerful tool that enables organizations to develop cutting-edge digital products and services that meet the constantly evolving demands of customers. For instance, a bank might use AI to create a chatbot that provides personalized financial advice to customers, while a retailer might use Big Data to analyze customer behavior and tailor their offerings accordingly. 

• By leveraging Digital Engineering, organizations can stay ahead of their competitors in the rapidly changing digital landscape. For example, a car manufacturer might use IoT technology to create a connected car that offers new features and services to customers, thereby differentiating itself from its competitors. 

• Digital Engineering fosters agility and flexibility in the development and deployment of digital solutions. For instance, an e-commerce company might use Agile methodology to develop its website and continuously improve its user experience based on customer feedback. 

• Digital Engineering methodologies such as DevOps and CI/CD enable organizations to rapidly design, develop, and deploy digital assets. For example, a software company might use DevOps to automate its software development and deployment processes, thereby reducing errors and accelerating time-to-market. This agility is essential for organizations looking to drive digital transformation and adapt to the constantly changing needs of customers and market conditions. 

To sum up, digital transformation is now a vital part of an enterprise’s ability to succeed in the modern world, particularly in the aftermath of the pandemic. Rather than a trendy phrase, it is a critical strategic element that organizations must adopt to remain pertinent, competitive, and adaptable to changing circumstances. 

The post Digital Assurance and Digital Engineering – The pillars of Digital Transformation appeared first on Indium.

Organizations want surveillance solutions that can monitor and publish data as it is processed.

Payment gateways are used to authenticate financial transactions and to publish the success/failure status after they have been completed. A transaction status is required for EOD billing.

Establishing centralised monitoring and alerting mechanisms necessitates a thorough examination of application and system level logs. If an incident occurs, all parties involved will be notified via message/email/dashboard so that the affected teams can respond immediately.

This article will go over the log aggregation process for containerized applications running in a Kubernetes cluster.

Business Case

One of our clients approached Indium for improved visibility of their log aggregation and System Metrics visualisation. The client has over 100 applications running in a variety of environments. As a result, proactive monitoring and maintaining 100% uptime of business-critical applications became nearly impossible. They also had to manually search through multiple text filters for CloudWatch metrics. This was a time-consuming and labour-intensive process. There was also the possibility of avoiding outages that could result in SLA violations.

As a result, the customer’s top priority was to monitor these business applications centrally and effectively.

On the market, there are numerous surveillance options. Traditionally, the NOC team performs monitoring and incident response. In such cases, human intervention is required, and there is a risk of missing an incident or responding too slowly. For automated monitoring mechanisms, the ELK stack is frequently used. This saves time and money by reducing manual intervention.

The ELK Stack assists users by providing a powerful platform that collects and processes data from multiple data sources, stores that data in a centralised data store that can scale as data grows, and provides a set of tools for data analysis. All of the aforementioned issues, as well as operating system logs, NGINX, IIS server logs for web traffic analysis, application logs, and AWS logs, can be monitored by a log management platform (Amazon web services).

Log management enables DevOps engineers and system administrators to make more informed business decisions. As a result, log analysis using Elastic Stack or similar tools is critical.

The diagram below depicts the ELK stack workflow and log flow transmission.

Business Need & Solution delivered

• The client lacked a warning system to prevent the application from failing. The ELK server recently crashed due to heavy load, and the affected team was unaware of the incident for three days.
• This mechanism for ELK server and application alerts was proposed and implemented by the Indium team.
• To avoid future failures, we wrote our serverless computing code in Python and deployed it to our customer’s infrastructure via AWS Lambda functions.
• When a pod in the Kubernetes cluster fails, the event trigger will be triggered.

The Lambda function monitors health and notifies affected teams via email. We also offered the solution in the form of an email notification of Kubernetes pod resource utilisation, such as CPU, memory, and network utilisation. Elasticsearch DSL queries and metric thresholds were used to configure these notification emails. If any of these system resources become unavailable, the client will be notified via email. The Indium team used the ELK stack to deploy a centralised monitoring solution. We created a dashboard for each environment that displays the metrics that are being used.

You might be interested in: AWS Lambda to Extend and Scale Your SaaS Application

Below is an example of how the metrics utilization is being captured and notified.

• Created the alert name in the Elasticsearch for e.g. [metrics-prod-CPU Utilization]
• Set Trigger event for every 1 minute
• Configured the conditions:

                  WHEN Max OF valu.max is above 90%.

• Added Filters as mentioned below:

              metric_name.Keyword: “CPUUtilization” and namespace.keyword: “AWS/EC2”.

• Created a group alert
  • _index
  • InstanceID
  • Metric_name
  • Region. Keyword

• Created Email Connector: [Connector Name]
• Configured Sender email. Alerts will be sent using this DL
  • Added service – Outlook
  • Host Name
  • Port: 25

• Created the Alert subject as [ALERT]: [PROD]: High CPU usage detected!!
• Below Conditions will be checked to display along with alerts:

            – {{alertName}}

            – {{context.group}} is in a state of {{context.alertState}}

            – Reason: {{context.reason}}

            – Routed the ELK link of the corresponding dashboard.

We have also used the Elasticserach query DSL for alerts configuration as below mentioned.

• Created the alert name for e.g.  [metrics-dev-CPUUtilization].
• Set Trigger event for every 1 minute.              
• Select the index metrics_dev and set size as 100.
• Query to capture data for required metrics:

{

     “query”:

      {

      “bool”: {

              “filter”: [

                    {“match_phrase”: {“namespace: “AWS/EC2”}},

                     {“match_phrase”: {“metric_name”: “CPUUtilization”}},

                     {“range”: {“value.max”: {“gte”:90}}}]

          }

   }

}

• Configured the conditional statements
  • If the metrics utilization is above 90%
  • If the utilization persists more than 5 minutes
  • If both conditions are satisfied it will send an alert email
• Added the [Connector Name] in Actions [created before]
  • Run when – QUERY MATCHED
• Configured the Email Recipients to receive the alerts notification
  • Created the Alert subject as [ALERT]: [DEV]: High CPU usage detected!!
• Added below Conditions to display along with alerts:
  • {{alert Name}}
  • {{context.group}} is in a state of {{context.alertState}}
  • Reason: {{context.reason}}
  • Routed ELK link of the corresponding dashboard

We successfully configured all of the dashboards, and our customers are using them for real-time monitoring. The Indium team accomplished this in a short period of time, namely four months. Benefits of the solution include lower costs and less manual labour.

If you want more information or want to know how we do it, contact us. We are here to assist you.

Benefits

The customer benefits from the use of the centralised notification method. Here are a few standouts.

• The customer now has a Centralized Monitoring Dashboard through which they can receive resource utilisation and incident notifications via email.
• 75% less manual effort than the previous method of refreshing the Cloud Watch console every few minutes to see the logs.
• With the Kibana dashboards in place, this centralized dashboard provided a unified view of logs collected from multiple sources.
• The TAT and MTTR (Meantime to resolve) for incident resolutions have been reduced as a result of this.
• Opensource Stack was used entirely to create a low-cost monitoring solution.

The post Realtime Container Log-aggregation and Centralized monitoring solutions appeared first on Indium.

Starling Bank is a UK-based mobile-only bank offering innovative, seamless financial services such as real-time payment visibility and contactless debit cards. The app is at the core of all its banking operations, connecting customers to the bank and enabling them to conduct transactions without glitches. Therefore, ensuring that it works every time was very essential for the bank.

The company used AWS continuous integration/continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD) with the DevOps approach to enable fast testing and scaling capabilities. This enabled Starling to address any bugs before they could impact customers.

CI/CD solutions is integral to the DevOps work environment. It automates the complete workflow of updating software or application from the time of building to testing, packaging, and deploying. In other words, CI/CD is a pipeline a new code is created on one end, tested as it progresses through the stages of source, build, test, staging, and production, and then moved to the production environment.

Benefits of a CI/CD Pipeline

Using a CI/CD pipeline enables the frequent release of new features and updates based on inputs from monitoring the app’s performance and feedback from customers. It reduces the risk of errors due to human intervention by automating the process. A structured, automated process also improves productivity. Using a microservices approach helps with releasing components independent of each other.

The second advantage is improving the code’s quality since, at each stage of the CI/CD pipeline, the code is tested and verified. Whenever a problem is identified, the code does not progress and is sent back for debugging to the team.

This article might give you an extended list of benefits of implementing CI/CD solutions: CI/CD- The Advantage You Didn’t Know You Needed

Use Cases of CI/CD Workflows in AWS

Some of the production-ready CI/CD services on AWS include:

Deploying Dockerized Microservices: It is easy to industrialize dockerized microservices with the AWS architecture.

Serverless Functions: A highly resilient and fault-tolerant CI/CD pipeline can be set up for automating the deployment process of Lambda-based serverless applications.

Machine Learning Pipelines: Machine learning models can be developed, trained, tested, deployed, managed, and monitored in AWS in a cloud-based environment.

AWS Developer Tools to Create Scalable CI/CD Pipelines

Amazon Web Server (AWS) provides CI/CD developers with tools for accelerating software development and shortening release cycles. These flexible services enable a scalable CI/CD pipeline by

• (i).Simplifying provisioning and infrastructure management
• (ii).Deploying application code
• (iii).Automating the processes for software release
• (iv).Monitoring the performance of the application and the infrastructure

The scalable developer tools for CI/CD pipelines include:

CodePipeline: This helps to automate the building, testing, and deploying stages of the release process whenever a code needs a change. It uses a defined release model that facilitates delivering features and updates rapidly and reliably. The code pipelines can also integrate with other services such as AWS Services, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and third-party products such as GitHub. Some of the use cases that AWS CodePipeline can address include:

(i).Code compilation, building, and testing using AWS CodeBuild

(ii).Delivering container-based applications continuously to the cloud

(ii).Validation of artifacts, including descriptors and container images, that are for network service or functions specific to cloud-native network pre-deployment

(iii).Testing functionality, performance, baseline, regression and integration for containerized network function/virtual network function (CNF/VNF)

(v).Testing for reliability and disaster recovery (DR)

CodeCommit: CodeCommit is a fully-managed source control service hosting secure repositories based on Git. It provides a secure and highly scalable ecosystem that facilitates collaboration on code. This solution uses CodeCommit to create a warehouse to store the application and deployment codes.

CodeBuild: CodeBuild can be used to build and test the code in a fully managed continuous integration service. The source code is compiled, tested, and ready-to-deploy software packages are deployed on a build server that is created dynamically.

CodeDeploy – The code or application is deployed onto a set of EC2 instances by a fully managed deployment service that uses CodeDeploy. It runs CodeDeploy agents to automate software deployments to several compute services, including Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, or even on-premises servers.

CodePipeline: Quick and reliable update of application and infrastructure is made possible by a fully managed continuous delivery service that automates the release pipelines. To build an end-to-end pipeline, it leverages CodePipeline to fetch the application code from CodeCommit, build and test using CodeBuild, and deploy using CodeDeploy.

CloudWatch Events: The CodePipeline on Git is triggered by an AWS CloudWatch Events rule to commit to the repository on CodeCommit.

A must read: Using Kubernetes to Run CI/CD Pipelines in Large-scale, Cloud-native Applications

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3): Objects can be stored in this industry-leading scalable storage service that ensures data availability, performance, and security. S3 buckets are used for storing the build and deployment artifacts that were created during the pipeline run.

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS): Cryptographic keys can be created easily using AWS KMS. It also allows easy management and control of their use across several AWS services and applications. The build and deployment artifacts in the S3 bucket are also encrypted at rest.

Indium–AWS Partner

Indium Software is an AWS partner with long years of experience in DevOps and CI/CD.  Our team of AWS experts leverages its set of pre-fabricated toolsets to break barriers to innovation and enable agile development of applications and software. We have cross-domain expertise, which helps us to understand the use cases and design and build software with assured outcomes. We have a proven track record, with more than 250 deployments of CI/CD deployments in AWS, in aligning business strategic goals with cloud platform capabilities.

Our AWS capabilities span consulting, system integration, and industry solutions, as we empower our clients to speed up their digital transformation journey.

The post Creating Scalable CI/CD Pipelines for DevOps with Various AWS Developer Tools appeared first on Indium.