The Norwegian Trekking Association (DNT) partnered with Efiocde to take their software development cloud native.
DNT is is a Norwegian association which maintains mountain trails and cabins in Norway, with the mission of providing environmentally friendly outdoor activities. With more than 300,000 individual members, the IT services of DNT provide an essential function to the organization.
Having made an early adoption of container technology, DNT had a technology stack that was in a relatively good shape. By utilizing Docker, together with continuous delivery and cloud infrastructure, the team was able to run several major Norwegian websites with a skeleton staff.
As Senior System Architect at DNT, Roar Skår was responsible for the running and maintenance of the various online services, as well as leading the various development projects.
The approaches in place were good choices in the past, however over time newer and better approaches in the container and cloud space became available. While there was a desire to adopt these new cloud-native technologies, the DevOps side of the development process had been down-prioritized due to resource limitations and staffing challenges.
In this context, DNT invited Eficode to have a workshop on applying modern operations in their development process.
Over a two-day workshop together, we dug into the current development and operations situation, and devised a plan for the future state.
| Existing | Future | |
| Cloud | AWS & Docker Swarm | Google Cloud & Kubernetes |
| Continuous Integration | Werker | CircleCI |
| Orchestration | Docker Cloud | Kubernetes |
| SSL Certificates | Manual | Manual |
| Database | Self-managed | Managed - Cloud SQL |
Having established a good path forward, we got to work as a team to implement the migration. Before long we had our first test workloads running on Google Kubernetes Engine when...
BANG! News rolled in that the Docker Cloud service will be discontinued, with only 60 days notice. This gave us two months to move more than 20 applications to the target environment. We formed a tiger team and together migrated the applications, getting across the finish line with 9 days to spare.
Following the transition, Eficode has continued to support the team at DNT in maintaining and improving the infrastructure and pipelines.
Roar lives happily ever after, and can now enjoy vacations in the beautiful Norwegian outdoors.
“We appreciate working with Eficode [formerly Praqma] because they were flexible, transparent, and can deliver to a budget”, Christian Strand, Leader for Technology and Development at DNT
“The great thing about working with Eficode [formerly Praqma] is that they don’t try to push any particular technology or solution. They listened to our needs and came up with solid technology choices that made operating our systems simple and frictionless”, Roar Skår, Senior System Architect at DNT.