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2017/04/24
 
24 Apr, 2017 | 3 min read

Motorola Mobility: Using WSO2 Integration Platform to Increase Business Agility

  • Hasina Abusaly
  • Associate Lead Marketing Officer - WSO2

Companies all over the globe are realizing the power of lean technology on the cloud and Motorola Mobility is one of them that’s taking action towards wielding this power. In February 2017, Sri Harsha Pulleti, an integration architect at Motorola Mobility and Richard Striedl, an advisory IT architect at Motorola Mobility, spoke at WSO2Con USA 2017 about their move to a hybrid cloud and container architecture with zero-touch automation.

A few years ago, on the day after thanksgiving, Motorola’s website crashed, resulting in the loss of many transactions from buyers who were flooding in to get their discounts. That’s when they started questioning how it happened, why it happened, and what they could do about it, explained Sri. All their web services were running through heavy-weight enterprise service buses (ESBs) in their data centers that didn’t have any other technical capability. They needed to move away from this to a lightweight platform in the cloud.

After evaluating many vendors they found WSO2 and its lightweight ESB - just what they had been looking for. Sri explained that they could quickly spin up instances of it and even set auto-healing and auto-scaling capabilities. WSO2 ESB (now extended as WSO2 Enterprise Integrator, which includes all the other key products and technologies from the WSO2 Integration Platform) also supports Amazon Web Services (AWS), which was their first option for cloud computing services. After choosing their vendor, Motorola began to make the necessary changes in their environment by re-architecting the system, setting up multiple ESBs and moving to a micro-platform architecture.

A year later, thanksgiving came along and this time everything went smoothly. “It was perfect, there were no issues and everything was absolutely fine”, explained Sri. However, a few months later, they realized that this was costly. Sri was given the challenge of finding something with the same capabilities as AWS, but at a lower cost. That’s when they started looking at OpenStack: an open source software for creating private and public clouds. It created an environment with similar capabilities to AWS and allowed them to set up their own data centers. After discussing further, they decided to run both environments (AWS and OpenStack) parallelly and scale them up or down as needed.

This time, they decided to use containers, which allowed them to package their software into standardized units for development, shipment and deployment. But why? It’s lightweight, flexible and easy to scale. Sri then went on to discuss the importance of emphasizing collaboration and communication between developers as well as IT through DevOps: “It’s something everybody wants to achieve”. Instead of having just a DevOps team to achieve this, they made a zero touch automation DevOps platform. This homegrown application called Debug 360 built on open source products allows their developers to focus on developing the code and checking it into a repository while the end-to-end automation takes care of the rest. It now takes less than a week to complete any new development in an integration model.

Motorola now has WSO2 ESB on AWS and OpenStack, one without containers and one with. The next step will be to integrate these instances to achieve their ultimate goal of spinning up instances in both environments, Sri noted.

Motorola Mobility Advisory IT Architect Richard Striedl further explained the concept of cloud elasticity. He stated that they have learnt a lot especially in terms of enhancing DevOps while working with WSO2 the last few of years. The requirements for cloud elasticity included having the same DevOps procedures, cloud capabilities and application code and auto-scaling.

“We’re evaluating WSO2 API Manager,” said Richard while explaining their need for APIs to manage the environment, build the framework and have more control over it. At present, they have 35 applications with 90% of traffic going through OpenStack and 10% going through AWS. Richard concluded by exploring their future plans of dockerizing with data services and message brokering capabilities available in the new WSO2 Enterprise Integrator. “We might even take that step towards Ballerina as we all learned today,” he added.

To learn more about how Motorola Mobility is moving to the cloud through zero touch automation listen to Sri’s and Richard’s talk at WSO2Con USA 2017.

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