Aspire Systems > Case Studies > Application Re-architecture and DevOps on Cloud to Improve Agility for STC

Application Re-architecture and DevOps on Cloud to Improve Agility for STC

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Buildings
Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Experimentation Automation

Services

Testing & Certification

The Customer

Saudi Telecommunication Company (STC)

About The Customer

The customer, Saudi Telecommunication Company (STC), is a leading telecom distributor in the Middle East. With over 6000 subscribers, STC provides a range of services including mobile computing and internet services. However, the company was facing significant challenges due to its outdated monolith architecture-based application. The lack of agility and flexibility, coupled with long development and test cycles, complex interdependencies, and extensive manual testing, was hindering the company's growth and ability to keep up with the fast-paced telecom industry. The company's outdated framework also made it difficult to adopt new technologies and implement continuous deployment.

The Challenge

Saudi Telecommunication Company (STC), a leading telecom distributor in the Middle East with over 6000 subscribers, was facing significant challenges due to its outdated monolith architecture-based application. The company was struggling with a lack of agility and flexibility, long development and test cycles, complex interdependencies, infrequent large releases, extensive manual testing, limited scalability and reliability, performance bottlenecks, and a lack of control of services. The outdated framework made it difficult for STC to adopt new frameworks and implement continuous deployment, which required the entire application to be redeployed. The company was striving to keep releases on track amidst these challenges.

The Solution

Aspire Systems, a global technology services firm, provided a solution to STC's challenges by re-architecting multiple applications to a microservice architecture. This new architecture is multi-tenant and supports data storage and a 'share everything model'. The deployment architecture was designed to use various managed services of AWS. Common services were architected as platform shared services, while separate services were provided for each of the application's key functional areas such as payments, orders, etc. These microservices were delivered using EKS. The solution also reduced direct communication between microservices by using an event-driven mechanism for inter-service communications. A centralized log forwarding system was implemented from application and clusters. This solution improved agility, better flexibility, loose coupling, and minimized dependencies, allowing the development teams to focus on various business areas of the application and aiding in the adoption of newer technologies and evolution of applications.

Operational Impact

The implementation of the microservice architecture and AWS deployment architecture by Aspire Systems significantly improved STC's operational efficiency. The new architecture promoted flexibility, reduced dependencies, and allowed for quicker deployment. It also enabled multiple development teams to focus on different business areas of the applications, thereby improving productivity and efficiency. The phase-wise evolution of the application, facilitated by the adoption of emerging technologies, made the company more agile and responsive to new changes. The new system also supports concurrency of over 7000 during peak load, demonstrating its robustness and reliability.

Quantitative Benefit

Promoted flexibility and reduced dependencies
Greater maintainability and quicker deployment
Allowed multiple development teams to focus on different business areas of the applications