A multinational leader in the design and manufacturing of world-changing technology needed a solution for managing and shipping end-user hardware testing components. For decades, they had to physically ship their new hardware, including chips, processors, server components, and memory cards to industry partners for compatibility testing with upcoming product releases. A timely and costly process, they needed a better way to manage ongoing end-user testing and reduce global shipping requirements.
Cayuse helped design, develop, and support a cloud-based web application to manage scheduling and provisioning of new technology product releases for customer beta and validation testing. Cayuse joined forces with the client in 2017, starting with a pilot web application. During the pilot phase, the system quickly grew to nearly 400 users reserving about 4,500 events across almost 600 servers.
Cayuse led efforts to research, develop, and maintain capabilities for distributed application hosting and container virtualization. Expertise in providing cloud services in multiple environments, languages, and building tools was pivotal.
From the start, Cayuse drove the project forward and led architecture and design efforts for both frontend and backend components. Cayuse was responsible for a variety of application development and support roles:
Cayuse developers supported various integrated development environments that required expertise in MS Visual Studio Code for programming the web application, database connectivity management, SQL programming, and various development tools, such as NodeJS and AngularJS. The project started with monolithic architecture, and was transformed into a highly available, service-oriented architecture.
The project began as a small on-premises webapp pilot helping a single team schedule resources against physical assets hosted in a local data center. It evolved into to a multi-server, cloud-VPS hosted, multi-layer application coordinating tens of thousands of reservations and other events. The orchestration occurred across a variety of software APIs and hardware located in several strategically placed data centers across the world.
During development, Cayuse advised and implemented the transition from single-server architecture using a local database-backed authentication, to a fully realized cloud solution. This transition took advantage of existing assets such as the client’s move toward SSO with Azure Active Directory as opposed to hundreds of custom login mechanisms.
The cloud solution successfully shifted the practice of shipping physical servers across the globe to hosting them in secure client data centers. Cloud technology platforms provide nearly identical access as if the hardware was physically on premise.
End-users are able to search for servers that meet their configurations, and schedule time to test their software and services against the new hardware and drivers. Once scheduled, automated provisioning is kicked off and the end-user gets an email notification with instructions and certificates needed to connect to the server virtually and securely. Following the server testing, the reservation can be cancelled or allowed to expire naturally. The application then kicks off a de-provisioning procedure to leave the server in a state where the next user can access it for their needs.
Cayuse provided significant expertise in software architecture, development, and cloud computing, and assisted in improving delivery times. Exponential cost savings were generated from the reduction in global shipments. Cayuse also provided technical leadership in keeping ahead of enterprise and industry changes.
The system, when turned over to the client as a mature application platform, was serving 12,000 daily users, and scheduling over 200,000 reservations across more than 15,000 server systems.