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(From left to right) SYSAGE Technical Consultant Ying-Chen Tseng (first left), SYSAGE Senior Technical Consultant and Manager Chi-Hung Chang (second left), SYSAGE Product & Support Center President Chien-Cheng Shih (center), SYSAGE Technical Manager Po-Chun Hsun (second right), and SYSAGE VP Cheng-Pang Chu (first right)
“With the help of VMware Tanzu, we smoothly implemented the agile development model to revolutionize the time-consuming and labor-consuming deployment and construction of the development environment for operation and maintenance applications. This allows us to easily output new functions every week and fix bugs and change versions every day and thereby enhance customer satisfaction.”
─ Chi-Hung Chang, Senior Technical Manager, SYSAGE Technology
With “agent of leading brands and value-added services” as its core strategy, SYSAGE has been an agent and reseller for over 20 years and is familiar with the ecosystems and operational models of original manufacturers. Being an agent of over 40 leading ICT brands worldwide today, SYSAGE officially joined the Qisda in August 2019 to provide customers with a wider range of solutions for hardware and software integration. With years of experience in application areas such as cloud services, big data, AI, digital marketing, mobile apps, IoT, and information security, SYSAGE helps customers to achieve one-stop digital transformation. To facilitate quality optimization and enhance service efficiency, SYSAGE decided to implement VMware Tanzu to establish the microservices architecture for realizing agile development.
SYSAGE engages in the agency business. Besides undertaking various external projects, the internal development team often needs to perform unscheduled transfers at midnight and provide on-demand call-out services, suffering heavy operation and maintenance burdens. After internal discussion, we decided at the end of 2016 to change the AP development model from “waterfall development” to “agile development” and used container/Kubernetes-based microservices as the practical foundation.
In the past, it was necessary for the development team to run through a lengthy process that covered requirements confirmation, function design, system development, testing, and going live before delivering the preliminary project outcomes and making repeated modifications and adding new functions according to the customer’s opinions. As a result, the project term would last 6 to 12 months. In addition, as old problems were often covered up through workarounds, resulting in unnecessary repetition and program chaos, increasing the subsequent maintenance burden.
After assessment, SYSAGE introduced the VMware PKS solution to quickly create many expandable Kubernetes (K8s) clusters to form the distributed microservices architecture. From then on, the development team defined individual small functions based on the customer’s fragmented demands to quickly complete the development of these functions within a week. Even if there were bugs later, we could fix them within a single day. This way, we could achieve perfection in introducing new functions every week and updating versions every day. When VMWare launched Tanzu in October 2020, SYSAGE switched to Tanzu without any pains.
“Agile development” is characterized by a small design scope, low design complexity, short development time, and test automation. The first two can be achieved through project management, while the last two involve CI/CD processes that must be achieved with technology and tools, and microservices are the best solution. While it takes 5 minutes for VM to start up but only 20-30 seconds for containers, the latter can better satisfy the need for quick expansion and fast version change. Hence, we selected containers for promoting microservices.
Then, it was necessary to build the K8s environment for container management to achieve deployment, expansion, and network automation. In the beginning, we tried to build a native K8s environment with open-source kits. However, the installation, operation, and maintenance were extremely inconvenient, and it took 2 to 3 days to construct one K8s cluster. If a worker node is damaged, it would take at least 2 to 3 days for operators to rebuild one.
By contrast, both VMware PKS and then VMWare Tanzu have simplified many complex procedures for personnel unfamiliar with CLIs to create one K8s cluster in only 5 to 10 minutes through GUIs with a single right-click. In addition, as both PKS and Tanzu support node self-recovery, when one worker node fails, the self-repair function will activate automatically without the need for human intervention. The operation and maintenance team can easily and efficiently provide the required resources and privileges via the vCenter management interface without using CLI commands, thereby significantly enhancing the management and support of the operation and management team for the K8s environment. In view of the quick version changes of K8s, the content library provided by Tanzu can support different versions of K8s running on Tanzu at the same time, which is a big help for K8s version upgrading or switch tests.
Benefiting from the VMWare solution, SYSAGE smoothly transformed its development model. Today, after receiving customer requirements, however unclear they are, SYSAGE can deliver a prototype within one week for customers to see and express their ideas. Then, SYSAGE captures the function templates accordingly to quickly optimize the system from ground zero. In addition to quick development, VMWare also enables fast bug fixing to complete debugging within just a few hours before automatically moving to the QA process, allowing one-step version changes and going live overnight to create an unprecedented, perfect customer experience.
Although both PKS and Tanzu are equipped with a container management mechanism, as Tanzu embeds K8s and container functions in the ESXi bottom layer, it facilitates operation and maintenance personnel to universally control VM and K8s environments (including PodVM and containers) via the vCenter without having to use two consoles. Hence, after the launch of Tanzu, SYSAGE immediately decided to switch to Tanzu. As both systems are based on native K8s, it was a painless, smooth switch.
