DIGA ensures performance and scalability and reduces costs with Azure

With so many deliveries and growth in the Brazilian market, it was time to reach a new technological level to continue offering the best solutions for its current and new clients.

Experts in customer service, DIGA is present in over 800 cities in Brazil with its management solutions, online monitoring of the customer service process, digital communication boards, applications for kiosks, tickets, corporate TVs, and various other options for the market.

With so many deliveries and growth in the Brazilian market, the company was facing management difficulties and high costs were becoming a problem, so it was time to reach a new technological level to continue offering the best solutions to its current and new clients.

The DIGA Challenge and Microsoft as a Solution

The main challenge for DIGA was that the company had its workloads, meaning its sets of codes and resources, spread across different public clouds, which created significant management difficulties.

Moreover, with the decentralized infrastructure, there were high costs within the business, and of course, reducing costs while maintaining – or even increasing – quality is the dream of any organization.

“When we started, we had few clients and developed technology on top of a small application, so we didn’t have all the capabilities that a cloud offers. We developed the solution on AWS, and what made us migrate at that moment was the cost issue. With this need we mapped, we designed a project to horizontalize, auto-scale, and put in the cloud so our solution wouldn’t stop. We sell B2B, but who uses the solution is our client’s customer, so the technology needs to be always operational,” points out Éder de Oliveira, responsible for the technology and development area.

To organize the structure and eliminate the problems experienced by the company, all workloads were centralized in a single Azure subscription, which provided smooth management for DIGA. More than that, the restructuring generated greater performance, scalability, availability, organization, and all of this with a very important factor: overall costs dropped significantly.

For this structure that elevated DIGA's technology to another level, a set of strategies and solutions were utilized, such as:

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS);

• Azure Database for Postgres;

• Azure Database for MySQL;

• Azure DNS;

• Azure Redis Cache;

• Azure CDN;

• Azure Application Gateway;

• Azure App Service Certificates;

• Azure Key Vault.

With the entire migration to Microsoft, today the company has all its processes running on Azure and, more than using it internally, DIGA makes this access available to its own clients, strengthening the experience with the brand.

“We have already managed to migrate all applications to Azure and did so transparently. The client did not feel this migration at any moment and, precisely for that reason, we sought specialists to avoid failures and impacts,” says Éder.

During the project, some challenges were encountered in managing connections to databases: Azure Database for MySQL and Postgres were not designed to manage waiting connections and reuse them.

As a result, performance issues were noted on the database servers, which forced us to increase the capacity of each one. To resolve this setback, our teams installed SQL Proxy instances to manage connections to the databases.

With the migration completed, Teltec continues to work with this client, providing monitoring and managed service for the entire cloud structure.

DevOps as a Differentiation of the Project

More than migrating DIGA's cloud, it was necessary to work integrated with the existing systems to minimize damage in the use of technology on a daily basis during the transition process, and that is precisely why combining software development with operations made the project even higher quality and provided good experiences for the company. All resources used in this structure were important differentiating resources compared to the previous infrastructure.

The use of DevOps in this project was decisive and was one of the first services where we used this structure. DevOps was fundamental in the behavioral configuration of scaling and performance of the Pods concerning the applications.

Through the HPA (horizontal pod autoscaler) method, it was possible to ensure that the applications would always be available and high-performing, without the need to incur additional costs by assigning new nodes to the cluster.

DevOps also provided monitoring of workloads at the code level of the applications up to the endpoint for the final customer. This brings a comprehensive and detailed view of the behavior of the applications and the infrastructure, allowing developers to identify problems in their codes for future improvements and have metrics to determine the growth of the environment.

It is worth mentioning that migrating from one provider to another brought many innovations to DIGA's environment, after all, there were many changes, and not all team members had knowledge about the new tool. For this, Teltec provided support with knowledge transfer, training, and worked alongside the client’s team to ensure that the migration was as smooth as possible.

“We had a lot of team preparation and we needed Teltec’s help for the development of the new service. Doing something in real-time was quite challenging, but it was very innovative. Today we already have the experience, we have the training provided by Teltec professionals, and we can pass it on to those who are on the team and to new members, reducing the learning curve,” emphasizes Éder.

Through this project, we once again put into practice the care and respect for the client, always bringing commitment, excellence, and transparency in the execution of tasks to provide peace of mind to the client during this important moment of technology migration.