Bechtle is a leading European IT company with headquarters in Neckarsulm, Germany. Their Competence Center AVS serves future markets from IoT and intelligent automation to AI, big data & analytics as well as multi-cloud services and enterprise architecture management and sectors such as energy, European institutions, healthcare, government, and education.
Bechtle Competence Center AVS provides solutions to various German government institutions, including the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. Their e-government solution, eAkte, handles sensitive and confidential data and must meet the highest compliance and security standards. Before deploying a new version, it needs rigorous testing in a high-security environment, mimicking those used for certification by the Federal Office for Information Security.
Before we used Humanitec to build our Internal Developer Platform, our developers were heavily dependent on Ops and security professionals. Now they are unblocked and can deliver faster than ever before.
The application, running on Kubernetes, is developed in Azure but tested on OpenShift in an on-prem, air-gapped environment using ArgoCD. This secure but complex setup required specialized Kubernetes and GitOps knowledge, causing delays and hindering value generation due to manual tasks and dependencies on Ops and security specialists.
The solution
To streamline their process, Bechtle Competence Center AVS built an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) out of their existing setup using Humanitec’s Platform Orchestrator. The IDP aims to abstract Kubernetes complexity and ensure a consistent developer experience across different clouds, including Azure and OpenShift.
Platform architecture
Bechtle Competence Center AVS adopted Score, an open-source workload specification, as a code-based abstraction layer. This allows developers to uniformly describe resource needs across any cloud, eliminating the need for Kubernetes or cloud-specific knowledge.
Humanitec's Platform Orchestrator then interprets these workload specifications against environment-specific resource definitions set by the platform engineering team. For each deployment, the Platform Orchestrator generates fresh app and infra configuration files which are stored in a Git repository. ArgoCD then pulls those files into the cluster, where they are transformed into the needed infrastructure components and the deployment.Â
Results
- Increased feature release velocity
- Improved efficiency, productivity, and customer value
- Higher automation with stronger security and reduced manual operations tasks
The outcome
Bechtle Competence Center AVS now delivers faster without compromising on security. The automated and secure workflows allows them to utilize various cloud providers cost-effectively, freeing developers from the intricacies of Kubernetes and multi-cloud environments. This approach has given the Competence Center a competitive edge and strengthened customer relationships as a professional service and software provider.
Building our IDP with Humanitec’s products was one of the best decisions we ever took. We design and develop highly complex, distributed applications for clients in heavily regulated environments. Thanks to Humanitec, we have been empowered to deliver our solutions faster, securely, and with high quality. The workload of our DevOps engineers has significantly decreased, while enhancing the developer experience for our software teams.
Timeline and evaluation
Target architecture design: 2 weeks
Platform MVP delivered: 4 weeks
Full integration: 4 months
Entire product ported after 3 months
Onboarding a new developer: 40 minutes
