RELEX Solutions: The strategy behind RELEX's migration to Kubernetes
RELEX Solutions is a market-leading supply chain and retail planning platform. As their customer base has grown and diversified, managing hundreds of customer environments of this complex application has become labor-intensive and difficult.
We have a long-standing collaboration with RELEX Solutions and we’ve worked together on many projects over the years, in areas such as infrastructure modernization, DevOps, and migrating products to Azure and Kubernetes. Recently we got a chance to help RELEX in a large-scale architecture renewal project for their main application.
Problem
Needing to ease operations and enable a much higher degree of automation, RELEX wanted to know if it would be possible to migrate their application to run on some orchestration platform instead of a traditional server environment.
"We have successfully collaborated on Azure Kubernetes projects before, so we have great trust in Polar Squad. That's why we turned to them for this project as well." - Ville Hämäläinen, Chief Technology Officer
Solution
Through us, RELEX got highly-skilled Kubernetes professionals with high technical expertise, long experience, vision, and understanding of the bigger picture. Our consultant Risto Laurikainen started with a pre-study of available options for orchestration platforms and their pros and cons from the point of view of the requirements of the RELEX software.
The pre-study also involved significant architectural planning to determine how RELEX could run the application on Kubernetes. Based on this pre-study, RELEX chose Kubernetes as the tool of choice for orchestration and started an initiative to migrate the application. After the pre-study, we continued architecting this initiative.
In addition to figuring out the technical details of the migration, it has also been essential to think about how to upskill current employees and familiarize them with the new architecture in a way relevant to their specific roles. The number of people involved with the new architecture is large, so an appropriate approach was required.
Empowering teams with active participation
During the initiative, the approach has been to enable teams rather than do the hands-on technical work on their behalf. Often, this meant first working with RELEX architects to create a high-level plan, then helping teams implement it while letting them do most of the hands-on and design work. This ensures that RELEX's teams are deeply involved in the design and implementation, enhancing skills and ownership.
The scale of the project—with numerous teams across various disciplines—makes it impractical for a small group to handle all technical aspects of the migration. Instead, Risto has led an enabling team that guides and supports other RELEX teams as they adapt to the new Kubernetes architecture through practical work.
Communication has been a cornerstone of this initiative, requiring regular and clear interactions with technical experts, product managers, and directors. It has been essential to understand the problem from the perspective of multiple stakeholders and to connect the initiative's big picture to low-level technical details. We have used value stream mapping to better understand the current situation and visualize how things would look in the new architecture.
Results
The migration is currently underway with a clear goal and a path forward. Overall, we see that the key to these types of migrations is an insight into the customer’s needs and the unique challenges created by their current software architecture, paired with a deep understanding of the platform, Kubernetes. This ensures that the migration not only meets technical specifications but also aligns perfectly with RELEX’s business objectives.
The new architecture brings many benefits. It raises the level of automation, making the software easier to operate. It allows development teams to work more independently, with less dependencies between teams. As RELEX has already widely adopted Kubernetes in the public cloud, using the same tools in the data center allows for better information sharing and collaboration between different parts of the organization. All of this put together is set to make it possible for the business to reach a bigger scale while maintaining high quality.
Could we help you gain these benefits as well? Let’s chat and see how we can help you solve the problem!
erno.aapa@polarsquad.com, +358 445 663 320