To retain and acquire customers, a fleet management company needed to rapidly deploy new features and functionality. A legacy data center was a significant bottleneck, stretching trivial deployments to 45+ days and hindering innovation. This client partnered with Trility to build a cloud platform and accelerate speed-to-market for customer-facing applications.
Growth through acquisitions left the client with a diverse software portfolio spread across on-premise data centers and multiple cloud providers. This lack of standardization hindered collaboration and increased operating costs. The critical result was a slow speed-to-market, with trivial system changes taking 45-60 days to deploy. This inefficiency threatened their ability to win and retain clients by hindering innovation.
The client's technical landscape was a fragmented mix of legacy applications, including 85 VB apps and modern .NET microservices. An existing "lift and shift" to Azure was not a sustainable long-term solution, and their teams lacked the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and cloud skills to build a modern development platform. They needed a unified platform where "the right way is the easy way" for developers, encouraging the adoption of modern, cloud-native patterns over maintaining legacy systems.
Our engagement began with a discovery phase to deeply understand the client's challenges and goals. We prioritized demonstrating value quickly by building a minimum viable product (MVP). In one early demo, the team deployed a new API, fixed a live error, and successfully redeployed it – all within 15 minutes, powerfully contrasting their legacy 45-60 day timeline.
A key part of our approach was actively breaking down the client's internal silos. We facilitated a RACI chart exercise to clarify ownership and demonstrate the need for cross-functional collaboration in a cloud environment.
Recognizing the client's operational limitations, we proactively recommended and proved that switching from a complex, self-managed Kafka cluster to Azure Event Hub would provide the same performance at approximately 1 percent of the cost, saving them significant operational overhead and expense.
This partnership approach established a deep level of trust, leading the client to engage us on cutting-edge projects beyond the original scope, including the development of an AI-powered chatbot using Azure OpenAI.
Trility leveraged a range of tools to implement robust solutions, including:
Established a robust foundation for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform and Terragrunt to ensure all infrastructure was versioned, repeatable, and automated. For CI/CD, we helped the client standardize on GitHub and GitHub Actions, migrating them from a mix of legacy tools including Azure DevOps, Bamboo, and GitLab.
The platform utilizes Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for container orchestration, with Helm for managing deployments. The event-driven architecture is powered by Azure Event Hub, and the entire ecosystem is monitored for performance and health with Dynatrace. To improve the developer experience, we implemented Backstage as a developer portal and integrated SonarQube for automated code quality analysis.
The client transitioned to a modern, agile cloud platform, laying a robust foundation for future advancements, improved resiliency, and a skilled team proficient in modern cloud practices.
Accelerated Delivery: A drastic reduction in deployment time enabled the client to deploy changes to a dev environment in one day and positioned developers to support on-demand features.
Cost Control & Savings: Delivered cost savings while achieving better performance and improved FinOps, providing greater control over cloud resources and costs.
Increased Capabilities & Reusable Patterns: A fully-functional, production-ready development platform managed entirely through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – including standard landing zones and reusable deployment pipelines enabling teams to release new products quickly and consistently.
Enhanced Governance & Resilience: Incorporated automated security scanning and secrets management from the start. The highly-resilient architecture uses Azure availability zones to provide "four nines" (99.99%).
