Client Overview
A century-old, US-based employee-owned company specializes in content creation and distribution across print and digital formats. They produce various materials including fiction, non-fiction, and educational resources, while also providing e-learning and assessment tools to over 1,000 educational institutions.
The Objective:
The client needed to continuously update and modernize its infrastructure to meet the growing needs of its industry. As a legacy business over 100 years old with a small internal IT team, it needed support with improving operations within its existing cost structure.
Challenges:
The client originally brought in Shadow-Soft to help them troubleshoot Kubernetes issues after a staff shift left the team with no documentation on the existing infrastructure environment. The client was log-monitoring their cluster using Graylog and experiencing difficulties.
After our team resolved the Graylog issue, we offered to conduct a health check of their environment and provide a roadmap using the remaining hours on the contract.
During the assessment, we discovered numerous issues caused by junior teams building clusters without the necessary experience or oversight. For example, there was no backup and recovery, no disaster recovery model, and the CI pipeline was a homegrown solution without proper maintenance guardrails.
While we redeployed the environment and fixed the issues, the team needed more resources and expertise to maintain the environment in AWS-hosted environment.
The Solution:
Shadow-Soft embedded team members to provide ongoing DevOps environment development, support, documentation, and knowledge transfer for their team.
Our embedded team oversaw and managed their AWS and Kubernetes environment from a DevOps perspective. After several months of working with this embedded resource, they wanted to accelerate development. We embedded another resource within their team to manage daily projects to meet this growing need.
For example, we’ve helped transform the client’s current DevOps team into a platform team. Our efforts ensured everyone, from the internal team to the embedded team to other contractors, was aligned with the same objectives.
From there, we’ve helped them onboard new solutions to maximize their current infrastructure. Additionally, we helped them migrate their Kubernetes cluster to AWS EKS, leverage support offered by our partners at AWS, and educate their team during 1:1 meetings to answer questions on how to effectively use these tools and workshop challenges.
Our team has also helped them build streamlined and automated workflows to efficiently retrieve code from their repository and put it into production.
Our Process
We are tightly integrated with the client’s team, fully in their workflow, and function as an internal resource. We meet with the development and platform teams daily to review goals, update progress, and identify blockers.
How Our Embed Team Works:
- Daily meetings
- Ideation and road mapping
- Sprint planning and retrospectives
- Ongoing workshops for knowledge-sharing
- Testing new ideas and recording outcomes
- Continuous implementation, documentation, and support
Key Features
Our embedded team knows the client’s existing environment, goals, and capabilities. This allows them to provide ongoing support that fits the organization’s needs.
At the same time, our embedded resources have a direct line to senior engineers. As a result, the client gets expert troubleshooting support and guidance from our leading experts without needing to issue tickets.
Additionally, we manage and upskill our team members directly. This ensures the client has the most qualified skills and resources within reach without the difficulty and financial constraints of upskilling and training team members independently.
Embedded Team Features:
- Rapid onboarding and deployment of critical human resources.
- Expanding the existing team’s capabilities to help them scale infrastructure modernization.
- Improving legacy systems and operations to a modern environment.
- Ongoing recommendations for new tools to optimize the environment.
- Developing and improving processes for building their AWS environment.
- Identifying new opportunities for improved operations, including the suggestion of observability monitoring tools.
- Training and upskilling through our team’s existing partnerships and resources.
- Access to (and continuous feedback, training, and support from) Shadow-Soft’s senior engineer resources.
Roadblocks
While the team had extensive knowledge in their fields, they needed more knowledge and experience with AWS. This lack of knowledge created roadblocks during assessments and improvements.
To augment this, our embedded team led the assessment and created extensive documentation around workflows and solutions. We also led several workshops to educate the team on tools, automation, and processes to improve business operations.
As a result of our efforts, the organization is now aligned on initiatives and has a much deeper understanding of the architecture.
Team Certifications and Experience
During our work with the client, we’ve shared our extensive knowledge of these tools and helped the organization evaluate additional solutions based on their needs.
Results
The organization values partners who suggest and test ideas. As such, we’ve built a collaborative relationship where we share feedback and pilot new solutions with the intent to innovate (regardless of whether those ideas come from an external partner or internal resource), which has been critical to the ongoing success of this relationship.
Building a collaborative relationship took time. Over the years we’ve been working with the client, we’ve established ourselves as experts with insights they can trust due to continued high-level delivery from our embedded team and senior engineers.
Additionally, it is tough for an organization to manage its internal team while tracking new tools and processes. Our team makes this easier for our clients by sorting through the noise to find which tools and processes will work best based on their needs.
Key Results:
- Increased observability across numerous departments.
- Increase team alignment toward business objectives.
- Ongoing training and resources through our team’s upskilling programs.
- Decommissioning dated infrastructure and resources, saving $10,000 in monthly cost savings ($120,000+ annually).
Future Roadmap:
We are looking to place additional embedded resources on the client’s team, as they find immense value in our work so far. They see our team as additional employees, not siloed partners or subcontractors.
As the client continues to improve their infrastructure and automate processes to meet client needs, we work will be working with them to support with implementation, knowledge transfer, and upskill.
We are also looking to bring in Dynatrace to help with infrastructure monitoring and security, adding an additional layer of efficiency to their application stack.