The Challenge
Vitality took the opportunity to end a long-term traditional approach to IT and fixed physical data centres as they found it restrictive, costly, and slow, impacting their competitiveness.

Vitality believed that they needed a ‘quantum leap’ in their IT. The business needed to become more agile, by bringing new products to market more quickly and cheaper than their competitors. It was decided that Vitality’s ‘new IT’ was to be PaaS-based and incorporated an ‘Everything as Code’ approach, from building infrastructure, project tooling, and delivery pipelines. A Micro Services software architecture was also chosen as being more flexible, ideal for automation, and reduced the risk of building a new generation of inflexible monolith systems.

When Vitality established that they needed 3rd party expertise, Penta Technology was selected. We were awarded a contract primarily for our superior knowledge of automation technologies. In addition, our demonstrable wealth of expertise in production-grade Kubernetes (K8s) solutions was the deciding factor.

The Plan
To kick start the program ePaaS, Penta’s Automation Platform, was used ePaaS enabled us to quickly and successfully demonstrate fully automated creation and deletion of Cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes Clusters. Our engineers worked with the Vitality teams to configure and enhance ePaaS which has now become Vitality’s secure and strategic platform for Development, Test and Production. In addition, Project development and test product lines were built to enable much more efficient ways of working for projects. The approach used involved multiple phased enhancements to the base ePaaS solution, to measure success and benefits incrementally.

The Benefits

• Large productivity gains – a typical six-month project now only takes six weeks. Projects focus on software products, not infrastructure
• Project inception takes minutes not days or weeks
• Self-service; once authorised, teams can create required projects themselves rather than being dependent on other parties
• Ability to switch cloud vendors, whether for cost, regulatory or strategic decisions
• Reduced complexity in migration to Cloud whether legacy, COTS or new-build
• Improved asset management, quality and cost control from a central function
• Significant management and cost savings across both development and operations. The obvious measurement of ‘DevOps Done Well’!

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