PartsTech is a U.S.-based automotive business specializing in the sale of spare parts to car workshops. Through the PartsTech online platform, auto-service shops can easily connect with suppliers and distributors to find the repair pieces they need.

The company aimed to expand its business to serve tens of thousands of clients actively seeking auto parts. This necessitated a robust, scalable, and high-performing infrastructure capable of efficiently managing the increasing number of queries.

Problem description

When PartsTech approached SHALB, they were grappling with frequent downtimes. Oleksii Sadovy mentioned that major downtime occurred every couple of months, significantly impacting the quality of PartsTech’s services.

The company maintained an AWS-based infrastructure, comprising of self-hosted Kubernetes clusters managed by kOps. While kOps facilitated automated cluster bootstrapping, manual intervention was still required for managing the Control Plane and worker node components. The need for PartsTech engineers to manually upgrade the cluster’s master nodes contributed to the company’s downtimes.

The partial codification of the PartsTech infrastructure posed an additional challenge as the configuration described in code didn’t match the actual cluster state, preventing the effective use of infrastructure management tools. This hindered automation and interfered with the company’s scaling plans.

Solution

During the project, SHALB engineers implemented the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach for the customer’s resources, enabling configuration-driven infrastructure management for the PartsTech team. With their infrastructure code stored in Git, any changes to configuration files now trigger automatic reconciliation with the actual cluster, eliminating any room for discrepancies.

The company’s infrastructure transitioned from self-hosted to AWS-managed Kubernetes services. With the migration to EKS, the responsibility of administering the Kubernetes master nodes shifted to the provider, resulting in a more predictable and less stressful process for the customer’s team during cluster upgrades.

Cluster.dev streamlined the bootstrapping and provisioning of EKS clusters for PartsTech. This powerful tool facilitated the easy deployment of EKS clusters with addons, IAM Roles creation, subnet tagging, and EC2-workers configuration management. Additionally, the PartsTech team could quickly launch standard environments for development and testing using Cluster.dev’s infrastructure templates.

Conclusion

By leveraging Cluster.dev, a platform designed for effortless deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters, PartsTech effectively tackled challenges related to infrastructure reliability, automation, and scalability. Cluster.dev seamlessly integrates with various Kubernetes distributives and provider-managed services.

For any infrastructure challenges, explore solutions with Cluster.dev. Experience it firsthand — request a demo, schedule an online meeting, or reach out to sales@shalb.com. Witness the power of streamlined infrastructure management!