Published on 28 Nov 2023.
Our system administrators moved a few cargo containers of work. (Yes, that pun was intentional, more on that below).
Find out here about some 2021 highlights from our system administrators in terms of managed services.
Virtual desktops
Over the past year, we've also been hard at work on a complete VMware Horizon infrastructure for one of our customers. This customer, active in private aviation, has several global bases and uses a centralized VDI (Virtual Desktop) infrastructure.
Contrary to what one might think, this is not an incentive to telecommute, but the complete centralized infrastructure of the global group.
Thanks to VMware Horizon, combined with a Nvidia GRID GPU solution, employees at any site can work seamlessly on their own desktops within the centralized infrastructure.
The addition of Nvidia hardware GPUs improves performance and end-user experience, which is essential for a modern desktop.
The year of containers
Docker containers have been around for a while anyway (back in 2017, there were already decent applications using Docker and Kubernetes on Belgian soil), but we've also noticed that in 2020 and 2021, container services are becoming more and more established.
This isn't news about containers in the negative sense of the word, but mainly about the emphasis on flexibility and ease of deployment of applications and services.
At Kinamo, we've been maintaining a number of environments on Amazon Web Services for several years, where so-called "containerized" applications are brought online via auto-scaling, load balancing and dynamic pipelines.
Admittedly, CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery/Deployment) can be difficult to set up and requires the necessary preparation... but once set up, it's a dream for developers and customers alike.
For example, we've been working for a long time with a customer in the human resources sector who, thanks to this solution, offers its own customers the possibility of implementing recruitment applications and integration platforms flexibly. The great advantage of continuous integration (CI) is that it enables the customer to deploy new functionalities efficiently and securely for its end customers, without any interruption to the platform itself.
In recent years, Kinamo has seen a sharp increase in demand for these containerized services and applications. In our own customer development projects, we also work with containers to streamline publishing (deployment) and integration (onboarding).
For Siemens Digital Industries, we have developed several online applications that are deployed via CI/CD. In combination with a CDN, we have implemented a solution that enables the graphically demanding and heavy content of the web application to be displayed quickly in visitors' browsers anywhere in the world.
More information
This post highlighting some of our managed services highlights was written as part of our 2021 annual review. Read also all kinds of behind-the-scenes information and discover some of the gems developed by Kinamo over the past year.
