Customer Case Studies

Security, Automation, True DevOps, and Platform Independence are Keys to Innovation in a Multi-Cloud World

For over 15 years, Li9 has helped clients modernize their customers’ IT environments by leveraging our expertise with traditional and emerging technologies. Read our case studies below and become part of the journey!

High Availability and Disaster Recovery for GitLab

Business Value

  • RPO and RTO – minutes
  • No service downtimes
  • Performance improvement
  • Always up-to-date service
  • Disaster-Recovery readiness

Customer Challenges

  • RPO and RTO – hours
  • Lack of High-Availability and DR
  • Backup operations lead to downtime
  • Service resource scaling requires downtime
  • GitLab updates require downtime

Solution

  • GitLab components are Highly-Available
  • GitLab components are split between AWS Availability Zones
  • Application nodes number can easily scale-out
  • Gitlab Geo feature enabled cross-region replication
  •  Gitlab Objects are stored in S3

Automated IT Infrastructure

Business Value

  • Automation standards and process are established
  • Reduced completion time for all processes
  • Cloud resources provisioning takes minutes
  • On-prem resources provisioning takes minutes
  • Greatly improved collaboration between IT teams

Customer Challenges

  • No infrastructure automation
  • Extremely slow IT resources provisioning
  • No standards for automation and configuration
  • No collaboration between IT teams
  • All the operations processes are manual

Solution

  • ~80%  of new infrastructure requests are automated
  • VM lifecycle is fully automated
  • Red Hat Ansible Tower is deployed
  • Engineers are trained to use Ansible Tower
  • All automation scenarios are available as self-service forms

DevOps for Hybrid Cloud Applications

Business Value

  • Infra tests coverage increased by ~80%
  • Infra tests complete within 2 hours
  • All infrastructure configuration is versioned
  • Delivery efforts decreased by ~20%
  • Dramatically shortened release cycle

Customer Challenges

  • High efforts on change delivery
  • High efforts on infrastructure testing
  • Testing takes weeks
  • Delivery to production takes months
  • Low test coverage (~20%)

Solution

  • >50 OpenShift clusters for Applications delivery
  • Application Development and Operations Automation
  • Build, test, and Delivery applications via CI/CD
  • Test and deliver infrastructure changes via CI/CD
  • Everything-as-a-Code

Automated Service Now Requests

Business Value

  • Reduced completion time for all processes
  • Reduced complexity
  • Azure resources delivery reduced to hours
  • Faster executions of Ansible playbooks
  • Bare-metal servers are provisioned in hours

Customer Challenges

  • 90,000 Windows/Linux Servers around the Globe
  • Service Now requests take months to complete
  • No standard for infrastructure automation
  • Globally distributed environment
  • Legacy RHEL servers, such as 5 and 6

Solution

  • All the Service Now processes are automated
  • RHEL 5 and 6 systems migrated to RHEL 8
  • Azure and On-premise integration is done
  • Azure DevOps works with Kubernetes
  • Azure and On-premise infra are automated

Automated Container Infrastructure

Business Value

  • Dramatically reduced the risk of human error
  • Pipeline-augmented application delivery
  • Seamless changes to existing assets
  • Application delivery speed is increased
  • Time-to-market improved

Customer Challenges

  • Manual resource provisioning
  • Slow application delivery
  • Fragmented knowledge
  • Lack of expertise in containerization
  • Highly regulated environment

Solution

  • Terraform for provisioning on AWS and VMWare
  • Ansible for post-provisioning configuration
  • Containerization strategy was developed
  • Automation workflows were developed
  • >20 OpenShift clusters deployed

Automated Service Delivery

Business Value

  • Lower learning curve

  • Easier controls for support team

  • Faster onboarding for application development teams

  • Enforced change policies

  • Developers and OPS work efficiently

Customer Challenges

  • Manual resource provisioning
  • Slow application delivery
  • Fragmented knowledge
  • Lack of expertise in containerization
  • Highly regulated environment

Solution

  • Container images are promoted via tagging
  • OpenShift resources are managed by ArgoC
  • MR approvals with master branch protected
  • OpenShift projects are provisioned automatically
  • Static code analysis to enforce best practices