changing featured case studies (#10092)

2018-09-05 15:09:14 -07:00
parent 5336022bef
commit bf343d81e9
9 changed files with 1970 additions and 32 deletions
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ cid: caseStudies
 css: /css/style_case_studies.css
 logo: ygrene_featured_logo.png
 featured: true
-weight: 2
+weight: 48
 quote: >
  We had to change some practices and code, and the way things were built, but we were able to get our main systems onto Kubernetes in a month or so, and then into production within two months. That’s very fast for a finance company.
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@@ -34,14 +34,14 @@ quote: >

 <h2>Solution</h2>
    Moving from an Engine Yard platform and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, the Ygrene team embraced cloud native technologies and practices: <a href="https://kubernetes.io/">Kubernetes</a> to help scale out vertically and distribute workloads, <a href="https://github.com/theupdateframework/notary">Notary</a> to put in build-time controls and get trust on the Docker images being used with third-party dependencies, and <a href="https://www.fluentd.org/">Fluentd</a> for "observing every part of our stack," all running on <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/">Amazon EC2 Spot</a>.
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 </div>

 <div class="col2">

 <h2>Impact</h2>
-  Before, deployments typically took three to four hours, and two or three months’ worth of work would be deployed at low-traffic times every week or two weeks. Now, they take five minutes for Kubernetes, and an hour for the overall deploy with smoke testing. And "we’re able to deploy three or four times a week, with just one week’s or two days’ worth of work," Adams says. "We’re deploying during the work week, in the daytime and without any downtime. We had to ask for business approval to take the systems down, even in the middle of the night, because people could be doing loans. Now we can deploy, ship code, and migrate databases, all without taking the system down. The company gets new features without worrying that some business will be lost or delayed." Additionally, by using the kops project, Ygrene can now run its Kubernetes clusters with AWS EC2 Spot, at a tenth of the previous cost. These cloud native technologies have "changed the game for scalability, observability, and security—we’re adding new data sources that are very secure," says Adams. "Without Kubernetes, Notary, and Fluentd, we couldn’t tell our investors and team members that we knew what was going on." 
- 
+  Before, deployments typically took three to four hours, and two or three months’ worth of work would be deployed at low-traffic times every week or two weeks. Now, they take five minutes for Kubernetes, and an hour for the overall deploy with smoke testing. And "we’re able to deploy three or four times a week, with just one week’s or two days’ worth of work," Adams says. "We’re deploying during the work week, in the daytime and without any downtime. We had to ask for business approval to take the systems down, even in the middle of the night, because people could be doing loans. Now we can deploy, ship code, and migrate databases, all without taking the system down. The company gets new features without worrying that some business will be lost or delayed." Additionally, by using the kops project, Ygrene can now run its Kubernetes clusters with AWS EC2 Spot, at a tenth of the previous cost. These cloud native technologies have "changed the game for scalability, observability, and security—we’re adding new data sources that are very secure," says Adams. "Without Kubernetes, Notary, and Fluentd, we couldn’t tell our investors and team members that we knew what was going on."
+

 </div>

@@ -57,7 +57,7 @@ quote: >
 <div class="fullcol">
 <h2>In less than a decade, <a href="https://ygrene.com/index.html" style="text-decoration:underline">Ygrene</a> has funded more than $1 billion in loans for renewable energy&nbsp;projects.</h2> A <a href="https://www.energy.gov/eere/slsc/property-assessed-clean-energy-programs">PACE</a> (Property Assessed Clean Energy) financing company, "We take the equity in a home or a commercial building, and use it to finance property improvements for anything that saves electricity, produces electricity, saves water, or reduces carbon emissions," says Development Manager Austin Adams. <br><br>
 In order to approve those loans, the company processes an enormous amount of underwriting data. "We have tons of different points that we have to validate about the property, about the company, or about the person," Adams says. "So we have lots of data sources that are being aggregated, and we also have lots of systems that need to churn on that data in real time." <br><br>
-By 2017, deployments and scalability had become pain points. The company was utilizing massive servers, and "we just reached the limit of being able to scale them vertically," he says. Migrating to AWS Elastic Beanstalk didn’t solve the problem: "The Scala services needed a lot of data from the main Ruby on Rails services and from different vendors, so they were asking for information from our Ruby services at a rate that those services couldn’t handle. We had lots of configuration misses with Elastic Beanstalk as well. It just came to a head, and we realized we had a really unstable system." 
+By 2017, deployments and scalability had become pain points. The company was utilizing massive servers, and "we just reached the limit of being able to scale them vertically," he says. Migrating to AWS Elastic Beanstalk didn’t solve the problem: "The Scala services needed a lot of data from the main Ruby on Rails services and from different vendors, so they were asking for information from our Ruby services at a rate that those services couldn’t handle. We had lots of configuration misses with Elastic Beanstalk as well. It just came to a head, and we realized we had a really unstable system."

 </div>
 </section>
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ By 2017, deployments and scalability had become pain points. The company was uti
 </div>
 <section class="section3">
 <div class="fullcol">
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+
 Adams along with the rest of the team set out to find a solution that would be transformational, but "wouldn’t require us to make huge refactors to the code base," he says. And as a finance company, Ygrene needed security as much as scalability. They found the answer by embracing cloud native technologies: Kubernetes to help scale out vertically and distribute workloads, Notary to achieve reliable security at every level, and Fluentd for observability. "Kubernetes was where the community was going, and we wanted to be future proof," says Adams. <br><br>
 With Kubernetes, the team was able to quickly containerize the Ygrene application with Docker. "We had to change some practices and code, and the way things were built," Adams says, "but we were able to get our main systems onto Kubernetes in a month or so, and then into production within two months. That’s very fast for a finance company."<br><br>
 How? Cloud native has "changed the game for scalability, observability, and security—we’re adding new data sources that are very secure," says Adams. "Without Kubernetes, Notary, and Fluentd, we couldn’t tell our investors and team members that we knew what was going on." <br><br>