impacx – Cloud-native app with modern architecture

impacx – Cloud-native app with modern architecture.

impacx services GmbH is a leading provider of Customer Experience Management services. Its 25 years’ experience of operations and consultancy combined with its technical expertise have seen impacx grow into a digital service provider for outstanding customer experiences, highly modern technologies and digital products. Bechtle modernised the cloud-native AWS-based tel-inform app to make it more efficient and secure, leveraging continuous integration (CI) and continuous development (CD) pipelines to accelerate the development and provisioning process.

Project details.

Services

Professional Services
Software
Cloud

Industry

Trade / Service

Manufacturer

Company size

250 – 1,500 employees

Challenge.

Operating as tel-inform until 2022, impacx services GmbH is a digital service provider that leverages the latest technologies and digital products to provide its clients’ customers with a holistic experience along the entire customer journey. To do so, impacx relies on agile collaboration, inter-disciplinary teams and intelligent Customer Experience (CX) processes. Developed in-house and recently migrated to the AWS Cloud, its tel-inform app allows all three. Customers use the app to efficiently manage their own telephone services—from simple configuration to customised call forwarding—to ensure they remain both reachable and flexible with impacx regularly publishing updates. When Bechtle put the impacx AWS Cloud under the microscope, the decision was made to modernise the environment and remove the tel-inform app from its single container for both front and back ends so that it could be used more flexibly. It needed to become a cloud-native application with a modern architecture that was both secure and scalable, but impacx was also looking to implement efficient CI/CD pipelines at the same time. The scripts that control the execution process needed to support developers when it came to developing software and optimise the process.

Thanks to Bechtle, we now have a secure environment in the AWS Cloud to fall back on. We can now better monitor and scale our tel-inform app and develop other applications in the cloud. Best of all, every single developer can now work with the CI/CD pipeline to install certain releases quickly and correctly, which means we are now much more agile and efficient and our app runs smoothly.

Andreas Dünck, Head of IT Infrastructure, impacx services GmbH

Solution.

The first step for Bechtle in modernising the tel-inform app was to audit the existing application, identify any security vulnerabilities before working closely with impacx to develop a new cloud-native architecture. This separated the app’s front and back ends into two containers to boost security and reduce direct access to the system. Doing so should allow the developers to develop and test updates in the back end without having to install them on the front. For this, Bechtle used the Bitbucket tool, with which the impacx developers can review, jointly manage and cache their versions of the app in the repository before they actually go live. The new two-container architecture was reconfigured step-by-step and implemented using the AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) to ensure efficient orchestrating and dedicated service in an AWS Cloud cluster. To this end, Bechtle configured tel-inform in AWS ECS, deployed the application there before migrating it to the AWS Cloud. Bechtle also set up the CI/CD pipelines optionally available through Bitbucket in order to automatically check and deploy new versions. The IT partner set great store in security and compliance throughout the pipeline and also integrated maintenance and pipeline optimisation best practices. Thanks to AWS tools, monitoring and logging mechanisms are integrated into the app, which impacx can use to to monitor app performance and identify issues. Furthermore the app is only accessible through a loadbalancer, which adds an extra layer of security as there is no longer any way to directly access it, however, all authorised developers are able to work with the CI/CD pipeline to install certain releases quickly and correctly.

In a final step, Bechtle trained impacx’s IT specialists in how to correctly interpret and use the monitoring data as well as how to best use and manage the new cloud-native architecture and the CI/CD pipeline. As a result, impacx will be able to manage and develop new applications in the AWS Cloud themselves in the future.

Business Benefits.

The new cloud-native architecture of the tel-inform app rolled out by Bechtle in the AWS Cloud supports impacx services GmbH’s developers when it comes to software development and also optimises the process. They can now leverage the new more flexible environment to develop new versions of the app more quickly to shorten the time to go live and minimise errors. Security and scalability are as a given for impacx as agility and efficiency, plus the company’s extensive knowledge of AWS and its possibilities opens the door to more cloud-native applications.