AFRICA
REGIONAL CHANNELS
AFRICA software on a virtualised infrastructure to create Malaw , a cloud platform named for the horse Lat Dior , a key Senegalese historical figure that represents strength , bravery , loyalty and competitiveness . The service provider currently runs 15 applications on Malaw , with plans to migrate another ten applications in the next six months .
“ Some of the apps we ’ ve successfully migrated include a self-service application for business-to-business ( B2B ) customers and a global shareholder assembly app created for remote voting during COVID-19 ,” said Seynabou Niang , Cloud Architect at Orange Sonatel .
Speeding time to market
With the aim of reducing application deployment time from weeks to minutes , Orange Sonatel has used Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate time-consuming manual deployment processes . Now , the service provider ’ s teams can deliver new services and features to customers faster and with two-thirds less staff .
“ Before Red Hat OpenShift , an application or feature deployment required at least three steps . We had to configure the infrastructure and environment before we could deploy the application ,” said Wade . “ We mainly use virtual environments , but the isolated nature of teams within our organisation meant requesting resources was a time-consuming process . Red Hat OpenShift provides a ready-to-use environment for production deployment . Now , our developers can deploy an application in a single operation that can be live within minutes .”
As a result , Orange Sonatel has reduced its time to market for new services from several months to eight weeks . “ Using Red Hat OpenShift helps us spend more time on innovation , such as aggregating mobile payments on to a single platform for all of Africa to create a convenient solution for travellers .”
Automation and self service
With automated , self-service provisioning capabilities now available , Orange Sonatel ’ s developers no longer need to wait weeks for the service provider ’ s IT operations team to build requested environments . Instead , they can use Ansible Playbooks to quickly and independently create environments for testing Java , PHP and AngularJS applications .
Together with Ansible , Red Hat OpenShift helps developers use a new DevOps approach to focus on valuable innovation , rather than managing the underlying infrastructure and compute resources needed for a Kubernetes cluster .
“ When we previously used community Docker on virtual machines , we needed to set up and monitor the environment . With Red Hat OpenShift , developers don ’ t need to know about the Kubernetes stack underneath , because it ’ s templated ,” said James Kokou Gaglo , DevOps Engineer at Orange Sonatel .
Using enterprise open source software from an experienced vendor helps Orange Sonatel protect its infrastructure and cloud environments from vulnerabilities and performance-affecting issues . Security-focused deployment is easier , as requirements are already incorporated into the Red Hat OpenShift environment .
Reduced hardware requirements
By adopting Red Hat OpenShift , supported by OpenShift Container Storage , the service provider has reduced its compute resource requirements . With efficient management of memory and CPU ( central processing unit ) resources , Orange Sonatel needs only one-third of the resources to run its infrastructure , compared to its previous approach of running deployments directly on virtual machines ( VMs ).
As a result , the service provider anticipates that it will achieve return on investment ( ROI ) within the next two years .
Focusing on innovation
After the success of its initial migration to Red Hat OpenShift , Orange Sonatel is migrating more complex applications to the environment . The service provider plans to migrate at least 60 total applications to Red Hat OpenShift within the next two years . •
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS Issue 35
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