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Challenge
+ A household name in high-quality audio equipment,
Bose has offered connected products for more than five years, and as that demand grew, the infrastructure had to change to support it. “We needed to provide a mechanism for developers to rapidly prototype and deploy services all the way to production pretty fast,” says Lead Cloud Engineer Josh West. “There were a lot of cloud capabilities we wanted to provide to support our audio equipment and experiences.” In 2016, the company decided to start building a platform from scratch. The primary goal: “To be one to two steps ahead of the different product groups so that we are never scrambling to catch up with their scale,” says Cloud Architecture Manager Dylan O’Mahony. “If they release a new connected product, we want to be already well ahead of being able to handle whatever scale that they’re going to throw at us.”
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Solution
+ From the beginning, the team knew it wanted a microservices architecture. After evaluating and prototyping a couple of orchestration solutions, the team decided to adopt
Kubernetes for its scaled IoT Platform-as-a-Service running on AWS. “Bose is a company that looks out for the long term,” says West. “Going with a quick commercial off-the-shelf solution might’ve worked for that point in time, but it would not have carried us forward, which is what we needed from Kubernetes and the CNCF.” The platform, which also incorporated
Prometheus monitoring, launched in production in 2017, serving over 3 million connected products from the get-go. Bose has since adopted a number of other CNCF technologies, including
Fluentd,
CoreDNS,
Jaeger, and
OpenTracing.
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Impact
+ With about 100 engineers onboarded, the platform is now enabling 30,000 non-production deployments across dozens of microservices per year. In 2018, there were 1250+ production deployments. Just one production cluster holds 1,800 namespaces and 340 worker nodes. “We had a brand new service taken from concept through coding and deployment all the way to production, including hardening, security testing and so forth, in less than two and a half weeks,” says O’Mahony. They have lofty goals, too: “We want to get to billions of connected products!” says West. “We have a lot going on to support many more of our business units at Bose in addition to the consumer electronics division, which we currently do. It’s only because of the cloud native landscape and the tools and the features that are available that we can provide such a fantastic cloud platform for all the developers and divisions that are trying to enable some pretty amazing experiences.”
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