Miele is a manufacturer of high-end domestic appliances and commercial equipment with the main office in Germany and more than 18,000 employees worldwide. Its subsidiary incorporated in New Jersey, Miele USA, develops a wide range of e-commerce services and most of them are running on Java. Today we are going to share their experience of running Java EE projects in the cloud, what challenges they faced, how Jelastic helped to overcome the issues and what results they have.
Originally Miele used GlassFish application server and hosted both staging and production environments in local facilities on premise. All the local environments were Windows-based.
Challenges
- Complexity of multiple local environments management
- Complex configuration of high availability and load balancing for GlassFish environments
- On-demand scalability is not trivial as it’s hard to allocate on-premise resources fast
- Necessity to automate CI/CD processes in order to speed up time-to-market for new services
Solution
In order to transform the IT process and achieve on-demand scalability, Miele USA decided to deploy several development environments in the cloud and chose Jelastic Public Cloud because of:
- Built-in support of GlassFish 3 application server
- Ability to scale it both vertically and horizontally in the cloud
- Multitenant self-service portal for developers that provides a way to manage different versions of multiple deployment artifacts (WAR files) and deploy them to GlassFish environments seamlessly, eliminating need to log in into GlassFish management console
They successfully completed PoC project. The next step was to migrate all Miele’s staging environments to Jelastic. The challenge was to interconnect Jelastic Public Cloud and Miele’s internal services in a secure way. So Miele considered different options and chose Jelastic Virtual Private Cloud hosted on a secure bare metal infrastructure of Packet in a West Coast data center within maximum proximity to Miele’s office.
VPC and Infrastructure Configuration
As a result, Jelastic VPC was deployed to Packet.net data center, located in New York Metro area, and interconnected with Meile’s internal services using secure site-to-site VPN connection.
With Jelastic, Miele easily migrated from VMs to containers without application redesign and deployed a highly available environment, composed of multiple GlassFish nodes and sticky load balancer based on NGINX. In addition, Jelastic helped to migrate all Miele’s staging services to the Virtual Private Cloud and shared expertise how to achieve the best performance for Java applications in the cloud.
One of the challenges was that Miele's local environments were Windows-based, meanwhile, Jelastic services are based on Linux. Nevertheless, this challenge was successfully solved as Jelastic provides GlassFish in a form of as-a-Service solution, eliminating the need of operation system management.
After cloud hosting of staging environments for 2 months, Miele decided also to migrate their production environments to Jelastic VPC. Jelastic helped to replicate a staging environment configuration while building a production environment. Starting from January 2017 Miele’s production services are running on top of Jelastic VPC infrastructure.
As a result, staging and production environments had the following architecture:
Jelastic side
- NGINX load balancers with sticky HTTP load balancing and failover
- 3x Glassfish 3.1 nodes in a domain mode (full profile) for high availability, running on Java 7
- 10 deployed microservices
- Monitoring solution based on Zabbix
Miele side behind the VPN connection
- 4 MS SQL operational databases
- IBM DB2 operational database based on AS/400
- Various 3d party web services
Migration from GlassFish to WildFly
Later, Miele’s headquarter in Germany decided to migrate the projects from GlassFish to WildFly. Jelastic helped Miele to roll out their staging and production environments on WildFly 10, as well as assisted in solving performance issues and enforced high availability of entire environment by replacing a single instance of load balancer with multiple HAProxy nodes, distributed across different physical hosts.
Currently, both staging and production environments have the following architecture (differ in scalability options only):
Jelastic side
- 2x Highly available HAproxy load balancers with sticky HTTP load balancing and failover
- 3x WildFly 10 nodes in a domain mode (full profile) for high availability, running on Java 8
- 10 deployed microservices
- Monitoring solution based on Zabbix
Miele side behind the VPN connection
- 4 MS SQL operational databases
- IBM DB2 operational database based on AS/400
- Various 3d party web services
Achieved Benefits
- Miele team doesn’t need to manage internal servers for staging environments
- No need in an internal expert who configures and maintains high availability. Jelastic platform fully automates this complex task
- Miele’s developers improved collaboration using Jelastic self-service portal and, as a result, accelerated time to market for modern services
- Jelastic VPC provides automatic scalability up and down, this makes on-demand scalability process as smooth as possible
Are you facing similar challenges as Miele and looking for the solution? Try out Jelastic Cloud (public, private or hybrid) with out-of-box application lifecycle management and automated scalability.
