Thanks to AWS Managed Services, our developers can finally concentrate on the important milestones of the Kärcher intranet. As a result, we are able to make the offering available to our employees worldwide in line with their needs – and with short loading times and virtually non-existent downtime.

FAREWELL TO THE MANUAL MANAGEMENT OF SERVICES

Internationally active companies often lack a synchronous information flow and stable team environment that transfers across national borders to employees working at very different locations. This is where the intranet comes into play. From the daily cafeteria schedule to current job postings, company news, or the digital bulletin board, company-wide networking takes place within seconds.

Before starting the project, Kärcher already had a developed intranet solution for its worldwide subsidiaries. However, the platform could no longer meet the company's requirements in terms of its adaptability, maintenance, and scalability. The original version of the platform was provided by another cloud provider. Services such as ElasticSearch and Redis had to be managed manually. This scenario posed a major challenge for the developers since, in addition to the manual management of services, the further development of new features and requirements had to be driven simultaneously. Moreover, some features of the corporate web offering were not designed to scale horizontally (i.e., across multiple instances) – the proverbial bottleneck.

In addition, the entire infrastructure of the previous solution was built manually, making it difficult to recover from disruptions. Therefore, Kärcher sought a relaunch based on the latest cloud technologies.

CHOOSING AWS WAS CLEAR

The fact that the migration to Amazon Web Services was the right and sensible decision for Kärcher was determined early on in the project. AWS is the leader in essential services that were necessary for the implementation of the relaunch. The buzzword of the day is “managed services”: ElasticSearch, ElastiCache, the CloudFront content delivery network, and other services are important technological cornerstones for solving performance problems and delivering a positive user experience worldwide.

Another important benefit of AWS as a cloud provider is that each AWS Service is well-documented. Within a very short time, the members of an IT team can become experts and carry out daily administration, deployment, and maintenance tasks independently. If problems do arise, AWS Support can be reached quickly from anywhere in the world.

Zoi and Kärcher have a successful, long-standing business relationship. Together with Kärcher’s IT teams, Zoi has already implemented numerous projects and provided significant support to many areas of the company on its path to digitalization.

Planning and implementing the intranet relaunch required a competent partner who could advise the company both on the selection of a cloud provider and the installation of a modern, needs-based cloud infrastructure. In these areas, Zoi stands by the customer's side with a great deal of implementation expertise. The consulting firm's experience in establishing a productive DevOps culture also played an important role, as this is sometimes decisive for the long-term success of a project.

At the beginning of the project, the focus was quickly placed on the use of selected AWS Managed Services. Thus, migrating to the AWS cloud in a timely manner was necessary in order to continue working on the infrastructure. Thanks to the use of Terraform, a new development environment including all core services could be deployed on AWS within a few days. This environment includes, from a data storage perspective, only the “fully-managed” services ElasticSearch, ElastiCache (Redis), and RDS (MySQL); from a computing perspective, the IaaS service EC2 is used for the web servers. The configured auto-scaling ensures an almost maintenance-free EC2 operation. Load balancing can now be done via the deployed application load balancers, and S3 buckets are included for media storage.

THE INTRANET AND THE DEVOPS CULTURE BENEFIT FROM THE CHANGES

One of the highlights of the project was and is the following: The migration to AWS is immediately noticeable as the web application achieves up to four times faster performance. The switch to AWS CloudFront and static web hosting, as well as the inclusion of content caching, helped Kärcher significantly improve the platform's load time.

Auto-scaling allows the number of servers to increase dynamically, ensuring high availability (HA) at a lower cost.

Thanks to AWS Managed Services, the cleaning company can now scale its intranet infrastructure in an automated manner and with significantly less operational effort. In particular, services such as S3, CloudFront, and integrated load balancers now provide highly available and maintenance-free components.

By integrating CI/CD processes and deploying Infrastructure as Code from 0 to 100 percent using Terraform, Kärcher was able to massively reduce operational effort. The deployment times of the infrastructure were thus reduced from several days to a few hours. The actual code deployment now takes place within a few minutes. All of this means more time that developers can use in their sprint planning to further develop the IT service offering.

Security First: The infrastructure is made more secure not only by AWS CloudFront with AWS Shield enabled but also by elegantly controlling access and permissions between services with IAM roles.

In addition, the IT organization can control these and other applications effectively, centrally, and securely. All activities are audited and monitored via CloudTrail. Services can be individually enabled or disabled via Service Control Policies (SCP) and checked for correct implementation using AWS Config. Straightforward and effective access to enterprise certificates can now be delegated to projects using Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM).

LESSONS LEARNED



The implementation of the new infrastructure with the switch to AWS was not only able to increase key parameters such as security, reliability, and performance efficiency of the IT service offerings, but it also represents a quantum leap in the DevOps culture at Kärcher. The mature AWS services enable optimal collaboration between IT operations and development, which in turn supports the high speed of integration – a long-term investment in the further professionalization of both areas. Over the course of the project, it also turned out that the Development department and IT Operations moved closer together. Furthermore, external service providers could be integrated even more efficiently thanks to the improved processes.

The relaunch came at exactly the right time. Due to its rapid integration, Kärcher was able to deploy the application before the Covid-19 pandemic, ensuring extensive communication before and during the crisis.

The fact that all images and graphics are displayed in the appropriate quality – with constant, minimal load times – can now be guaranteed by Kärcher permanently and without effort. The new architecture makes extensive use of the CloudFront content delivery network for this purpose. The AWS Service plays an important role in the new intranet: It allows data, videos, and applications to be transmitted with low latency as well as high transmission speed within a secured network to users all over the world. This includes countries where access via the previous cloud provider was not possible. Image post-processing (i.e. thumbnail generation, filtering, and compression) will now be split between microservices. The implementation is done by AWS Lambda. Cost-effective and on-demand coverage of the processes is now guaranteed.

Before the final deployment of the new infrastructure, the collection and storage of log files were ensured by agent-based CloudWatch logs. For visualization, all relevant metrics already provided by AWS were summarized in CloudWatch dashboards and made available to both IT as well as the business. As a result, it is now possible to view and examine all relevant information generated by databases, load balancers, and AWS Lambda in a centralized view.

Thanks to the relaunch and use of custom-fit AWS technologies, the installed applications could thus be raised to a very high and secure level of automation.

ABOUT KÄRCHER

Alfred Kärcher SE & Co. KG is headquartered in Winnenden, Germany, and has 150 subsidiaries in 78 countries. They are the world's leading supplier of cleaning technology and are probably best known for their high-pressure cleaners and range of products and services for professional cleaning of offices, hotels, and supermarkets. The family-owned company employs around 14,400 people and can look back on a company history spanning more than 85 years.

Diagram of the applied target architecture.