Our system administrators have lifted a couple of cargo ships filled with containers of work. (yes, that pun was on purpose, more on this below).
Discover here some 2021 highlights of the managed services projects from our system administrators.
Virtual desktops
In the past year we have worked hard on a completely dedicated VMware Horizon infrastructure for one of our customers. The customer, operating in private aviation, has several global bases and uses a centralized VDI (Virtual Desktop) infrastructure.
Contrary to what you might think, it is not a telework-fuelled incentive but the entire centralized infrastructure of the global group.
By means of VMware Horizon, in combination with an Nvidia GRID GPU solution, employees from any location / base can work smoothly on the centralized infrastructure on their own desktop.
Adding the Nvidia hardware GPUs provides an improved performance and end-user experience, indispensable for a modern desktop.
The year of the containers
Docker containers have been around for some time now (in 2017 there were already decent amount of applications on Belgian soil that used Docker and Kubernetes), but we have also noticed that in 2020 and 2021 container services are becoming more and more common.
No container news in a negative sense but positive news, with especially the emphasis on flexibility and ease of deploying applications and services.
At Kinamo we have been maintaining a number of environments on Amazon Web Services for several years in which so-called “containerized” applications are placed online via auto scaling, load balancing and dynamic pipelines.
Admittedly, CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery/Deployment) can be challenging to set up and requires preparation… but once set up, it’s a dream for both developer and customer.
We have been working already for a couple of years with a client active in the HR sector who, thanks to this solution, offers its own clients the opportunity to set up recruitment apps and integration platforms in a flexible way. The big advantage of using continuous integration (CI) is that it allows the customer to safely and efficiently deploy new features for their end customers, without interruption on the platform itself.
In recent years there has been a steep increase in demand at Kinamo for these containerized services and applications. For example, in our own development projects for customers, we also work with containers to streamline publication (deployment) and integration (integration).
For Siemens Digital Industries we developed several online applications that are deployed via CI/CD. Combined with a CDN, we have set up a solution that allows the graphically demanding and heavy content of the web application to be quickly displayed in the visitor’s browsers anywhere in the world.
More news
We wrote this post as part of our annual overview of 2021. In other posts you’ll also discover more about things we did behind the scenes and some of the development gems created in 2021.
