References

Working in business-critical environments since 1998: telecommunications, banking and IT service providers. A selection of our projects — and what came out of them.

Migration to the cloud

IT service provider, financial sector

Migration of around 70 Oracle instances from production and test into the AWS cloud, including complex RAC and Data Guard installations. The upgrade from Oracle 12c to 19c was carried out in the same step. The migration itself was automated with Ansible, and the Data Guard environments were partly rebuilt. This was accompanied by the analysis of application problems that surfaced during the version change.

Result: completed after nine months. Every single migration ran inside the maintenance window agreed in advance and was billed at a fixed price. There was no unplanned downtime.

Telecommunications group

Relocation of an Atlassian platform (Confluence, Jira, Crowd) with its development, test and production environments from on-premises to AWS — under the group's security requirements, which correspond to the German BSI baseline protection standard. This included connecting to the corporate intranet and to an IAM system, migrating all data, and building and verifying the backup strategy for both the application and the databases.

Financial services provider, market and reference data

Connecting and migrating existing Oracle databases from on-premises to AWS, alongside the ongoing operation of a three-node RAC environment with ASM and Data Guard.

Replacing Oracle: PostgreSQL and MySQL

Telecommunications group

Migration of the Oracle database behind a Confluence installation to PostgreSQL as part of the move to AWS. In addition, a PostgreSQL high-availability solution was built on-premises and the existing data migrated onto it.

Result: 16 processor licences of Oracle Enterprise Edition were freed up — at a core factor of 0.5 that corresponds to 32 Intel cores no longer requiring licences or support.

Financial services provider, market and reference data

Connecting MySQL and PostgreSQL satellite databases to an existing Oracle landscape and to the z/OS host system — a stepwise way of taking load and licences out of the Oracle core without touching the main application.

Telecommunications group, IoT platform

Installation and operation of PostgreSQL clusters as a high-availability solution, backup and restore with pgBackRest, failover with Patroni. Run as a managed service with defined response times.

Automation and deployment

Telecommunications group, IoT platform

Development of Ansible playbooks for the maintenance and deployment tasks of the entire platform, including its connection to the central logging solution. Migration of the Kubernetes deployment from kubectl to ArgoCD and its integration into the CI/CD process using Helm charts and HashiCorp Vault.

IT service provider, financial sector

Full automation of a large-scale Oracle migration with Ansible — the prerequisite for moving around 70 instances within a tight schedule and in reproducible quality.

Telecommunications group

Build and deployment through GitLab pipelines based on defined non-functional requirements, together with the prompt rollout of patches and security updates for operating system and middleware.

7×24 platform operations

Telecommunications group, IoT platform

Operation of the Cloud of Things platform as a managed service over several years: regular Cumulocity releases, maintenance of the Kubernetes clusters, security updates, monitoring and automated evaluation of SLA times.

Result: the contract specified 99.99 percent availability — less than an hour of downtime per year — and a response time of 15 minutes. Both were met for the entire term, with no SLA breaches.

Mobile networks, operations for third-party customers

DevOps and 7×24 operation of a cloud mobile network solution on Kubernetes, running in AWS and in a network operator's data centres. Third-level support, analysis of 3GPP data streams and network faults, optimisation for maximum throughput, construction of the HA solution, and development of a WAF and intrusion detection solution.

Telecommunications group, e-book platform

Design and construction of the build, test and production environments for a consumer reading platform, including installation and HA configuration of the Oracle databases with Active Data Guard. Maintenance under an SLA contract, continuous production operations, and support for the development team on architectural decisions.

Telecommunications group, development platform

Operation of a virtualisation platform with 70 hardware nodes and around 400 virtual machines running Windows, Ubuntu, SLES and RHEL. On top of it, operation of the production and development Oracle databases, Data Guard instances with Active Standby, and the design and operation of the RMAN backup solution.

Monitoring and operational transparency

Telecommunications group

Construction of an end-to-end monitoring and alerting solution to secure 7×24 availability across all applications, together with a central logging solution based on Elasticsearch and Kibana. Further development of the monitoring stack with Icinga, Prometheus and Grafana.

Mobile networks

Monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana and Alertmanager for a Kubernetes-based network platform.

Oracle performance and data warehousing

Major bank, international project team

Development and operation of a data warehouse holding 3 TB per database across four environments — production, BCP, development and UAT. Around 6,000 batch jobs daily, analysis through web reports and Cognos cubes, and delivery of aggregated and real-time data to downstream systems. This included the design and development of the real-time link to the bank's securities trading system through DB2 DataCapture, which replaced the previous end-of-day processing, as well as migrations from Oracle 8i through 9i RAC to 10g and high-performance tuning for massively parallel batch processing.

Telecommunications group

Operation of an infrastructure for decoupled reporting based on Oracle Streams with around 20 TB of data, serving roughly 20 customer-facing and infrastructure applications. Implementation of archiving and historisation solutions using Oracle Partitioning, and the introduction of Advanced Compression and SQL Plan Management.

Financial services provider, market and reference data

Design and development of an Oracle-based data service processing engine to replace an existing host solution supplying external customers with market and reference data. Generic ETL processes in PL/SQL for a real-time data feed from the host system, conversion of the host data structures into key-value structures, and tuning of the existing batch processing jobs.

Result: the batch runs had stopped meeting the delivery times promised to external customers. After the tuning work was completed, the SLA times were met consistently again.

Security and compliance

Telecommunications group

Implementation of all security measures required under the group's own PSA procedure, which corresponds to the German BSI baseline protection standard, across several platforms. Hardening of all infrastructure components, technical data protection measures for every database system in operation, and regular evidence reporting.

We are happy to send you more detailed information on any of these projects on request.