Description of delivery
Brønnøysundregistrene develops and maintains digital services that coordinates the dialogue between public organisations, private persons and companies to make it more efficient and simplified. Brønnøysundregistrene manages several of the most important registries of Norway.
Brønnøysundregistrene has over the past years built and deployed a new platform to support all registries delivered through BRsys. This new platform has been designed as a local Platform as a Service (PaaS) utilising modern container technology to support a Microservices Architecture (MSA) and an agile development/deploy methodology.
State-of-the-art container platform
The platform is built using the Red Hat OpenShift container platform (OCP), Kubernetes and Docker technology. All services developed supports a Cloud Native approach, but is currently being run on Brønnøysundregistrenes on-premise datacenters.
The platform is hosted, maintained and further developed by Brønnøysundregistrenes platform team. Redpill Linpro in close cooperation with Red Hat has supported the platform team with additional capacity, as well as services to increase knowledge and supported the further development and roll out of the container platform.
Open Source database solution
Brønnøysundregistrene has further decided to use an Open Source based relational database for the BRsys applications. They made the decision to use PostgreSQL as the preferred RDBMS for BRsys. Redpill Linpro initially assisted Brønnøysundregistrene with architectural advice, establishment of various test environments, configuration and migration.
We have further had a particular responsibility for maintaining the Ansible roles used for installation, configuration, upgrade and deletion of PostgreSQL instances. Brønnøysundregistrene and Redpill Linpro has further developed new methods that will be used to deliver PostgreSQL on the Red Hat Openshift Container platform.
A dedicated support agreement with 24/7 availability for the PostgreSQL platform will be used to support the installation.
Delivered services
Redpill Linpro together with Red Hat has been an integral part of Brønnøysundregistrene for the entire process from architectural decisions to actual deploy and support of the chosen architecture and platform.
Initially Redpill Linpro supported with description of the required work required to build the target architecture and assisted with estimates and descriptions on how to go about with the migration from services and applications like Weblogic, Glassfish, WildFly and Tomcat to the Red Hat Openshift Platform (OCP).
Over time delivered services has shifted to focus on hosting, maintenance and further development of the deployed platform based on Linux, Openshift, Docker, Kubernetes and other products in the Red Hat portfolio.
This includes, but is not limited to, development and maintenance of the following technologies :
- Docker images to support development teams.
- OCP custom builders
- Build and deploy pipelines (Jenkins)
- Automation (Ansible and Ansible Tower)
- Monitoring (Prometheus and Grafana)
- Patching
- Documentation and use of the actual PaaS services
- AD/LDAP integration for access control
- Strategies for safety/security backups and restore
- Replication, scaling strategies, tuning, provisioning and much more…
The result
The registries provided by Brønnøysundregistrene are important for an efficient delivery of the administrative services of the public Norway and the cooperation of public organisations, private companies and private persons that are part of the society.
As the digitization of the society increases and the demand for new digital services emerge, Brønnøysundregistrene needed to review their application infrastructure and supporting tooling to develop an architecture that makes it easy to add new functionality as well as monitor and maintain existing capabilities.
They have managed to do this by utilising a container based infrastructure, a microservices architecture and agile methodologies to support a DevOps approach to development and deploy of applications. This way Brønnøysundregistrene can quickly respond to new requirements, add new functionality and modify existing applications without having to risk affecting other vital parts of the BRsys applications.
Being able to do this utilising Open Source based software also ensures flexibility, prevention of lock-in and being cost efficient. Brønnøysundregistrene has really brought their application infrastructure into the future, to be prepared for all coming digitization requirements.
