Migration to Google Cloud: Havelock
Havelock is a work and project management platform built to streamline processes in multi-department companies operating in industries with constant re-arrangement of the initial plans.
The scale-up aims to address the issues that are commonly faced but cannot be resolved by existing software. These issues include overloaded communication channels, inadequate transparency in project status updates, inter-departmental blame-shifting, delays in cross-functional projects, and other related problems. In essence, Havеlock aims to provide a solution that goes beyond what current software can achieve.
Services
Our Services
- Providing consultation to clients regarding the benefits of utilizing Google Cloud technology
- Performing a thorough review, automation, and execution of the complete infrastructure migration process to Google Cloud from scratch, while adhering to industry best practices.
Our deliverables
- The process involves creating folders, projects, and activating necessary APIs within these projects.
- Service accounts are created and linked with the organization's billing account.
- VPC networks and load balancers are established.
- Configured the necessary organizational policies and firewall rules.
- A functional Nomad cluster is deployed.
- Unmanaged and managed instance groups are created.
- An image is created with Packer, which is then used as a template for instances.
- Creating and administering groups within Google Cloud and configuring notification groups to receive alerts and notifications.
- Creating an automatic renewal mechanism for certificates generated by Certbot.
We used
- Terraform
- Google Cloud
- Github Action
- Nomad
The Challenge
- As a pioneer of a modern, self-sufficient approach to project and process management, Havelock needed to showcase its software capabilities and offer test/demo environments to potential customers to boost sales. However, the legacy cloud provider and technological setup for these demos resulted in extra expenses, making it challenging to justify the investment.
- From a technical perspective: Havelock require а set up a fully operational infrastructure in Google Cloud, in accordance with Google's best security practices. This includes setting up a functional Nomad cluster as well as fully automating the entire infrastructure creation process.
Solution
The solution involved leveraging both commercial enablement and technology migration and setup. With Cloud Office as the trusted advisor, we followed the steps of the Google for Digital Natives Startups program, utilizing the template provided by Google Cloud and HashiCorp. This allowed us to create all necessary folders and projects, service accounts, and resources such as virtual machines, private networks, and load balancers, while adhering to the best practices of Google. We deployed a fully functional Nomad cluster in Google Cloud and established a fully automated mechanism for certificate renewal using GitHub Actions. In addition, our extended DevOps team utilized technologies such as K8s with autopilot, compute engine, and CloudSQL to deliver seamless migration and setup.
Result
A fully operational and properly functioning infrastructure, automated and deployed in Google Cloud using Terraform and GitHub Actions. Each created project will have the necessary resources allocated to it. The projects will be accessed only by admin groups or service accounts with appropriate permissions. The Nomad cluster will also be fully functional, with server and client machines ready for use. Additionally, a mechanism for updating the certificate generated by Certbot will be set up to renew automatically at specified times