Kabisa, in collaboration with SURF, has set up High Available and scalable Kubernetes clusters in Azure. SURF is an alliance of Dutch educational and research institutions in which members join forces. Within SURF; universities, colleges, vocational schools, UMCs and research institutions work together to procure or develop the best possible digital services and encourage knowledge sharing by continuing to innovate.
SURF’s existing infrastructure had been set up manually. A hand-built infrastructure is often based on individual configurations of servers and networks. This can lead to inconsistency and problems in tracking changes. Moreover, such infrastructures can be difficult to automate or integrate with other systems.
The challenge of this project was to provide the existing infrastructure with Infrastructure as Code, making management simpler and more transparent. In addition, there was a need to make more use of Azure Native Services such as Azure Cache for Redis and CosmosDB.
The infrastructure is set up entirely with Infrastructure as Code in Azure – Microsoft’s cloud service. Azure service AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) is the platform of choice for hosting the containerized software. Deployment of both infrastructure and applications is done within a CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) environment using Terraform and GitLab. This has given SURF control over both the Azure infrastructure and the process by which they deploy applications.
1. Increased uptime by moving stateful workflows to services such as: Mongo, Postgres and Regis.
2. Increased security through the use of keyvaults for classified documents.
3. Fewer false positives during monitoring by verbalizing the Prometheus and Alert Manager.
Creating a future-proof, reliable and safe infrastructure is a top priority. Therefore, we follow new technologies closely and are not afraid to use them if it benefits the end result.
