About Mobicom
Mobicom Corporation LLC is Mongolia’s largest telecommunications service provider, offering a broad range of services including mobile, internet, and financial services. With over 80 developers, Mobicom aimed to revolutionize its development workflows and move 80-90% of its infrastructure from physical machines to the cloud.
The Challenge
As a pioneer in Mongolia’s technology sector, Mobicom faced critical challenges in modernizing its internal developer workflows:
- Infrastructure Modernization: The majority of their infrastructure still relied on physical machines, and transitioning to the cloud was essential.
- Developer Experience: Developers were required to learn administrative knowledge about environments, networking, and tools like monitoring and logging, increasing their cognitive load.
- Repetitive Tasks: Platform engineers spent excessive time on manual and repetitive tasks, such as setting up environments, deploying applications, and managing resources.
- Workflow Bottlenecks: Deployments to new environments required administrators’ intervention, leading to delays and inefficiencies.
Mobicom required a solution that would streamline its workflows, enhance developer autonomy, and reduce operational complexity.
The Solution
Mobicom partnered with Humanitec to build an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) leveraging the Humanitec Platform Orchestrator and Score. The collaboration followed a phased approach:
Platform Design and MVP Implementation:
- The MVP focused on deploying containerized workloads to development, staging, and production environments on a Rancher Kubernetes cluster.
- The platform’s architecture incorporated GitLab pipelines for CI/CD and Terraform for infrastructure automation.
"What I loved most about working with Humanitec was how intuitive and customizable the platform was. It truly felt like we were building something tailored to Mobicom’s specific needs, and the team’s expertise made the process smooth and enjoyable"
– Tumentsatsral Badraa, Platform Team Lead, Mobicom.
Production Readiness Program (PRP):
- Mobicom onboarded its first production application, comprising multiple workloads with shared dependencies such as databases and external services.
- Development, staging, and production environments were isolated into separate Rancher clusters, with resources managed using Terraform and Kubernetes manifests.
Enhanced Developer Workflows:
- Developers transitioned to using Score files for workload configuration, enabling them to deploy applications via simple git push commands.
- The platform orchestrator automated resource provisioning and lifecycle management, minimizing manual intervention.
Training and Onboarding:
- A series of technical sessions ensured the platform team and developers were equipped to use the platform effectively.
Results
Mobicom achieved transformative results with its new IDP:
- Increased Developer Autonomy: Developers gained self-service capabilities, reducing their reliance on administrators for deployments.
- Reduced Cognitive Load: The use of Score files simplified interactions with infrastructure and workflows.
- Improved Productivity: Automation of repetitive tasks allowed platform engineers to focus on higher-value activities.
- Faster Onboarding: New developers were able to make their first pull requests within a day.
- Streamlined Deployments: Deployment to production now follows a seamless pipeline, reducing time-to-market for new features.
“Seeing how much easier the platform has made life for our developers has been so rewarding. We’ve achieved a level of standardization and efficiency that we previously thought was out of reach.”
– Tumentsatsral Badraa, Platform Team Lead, Mobicom.
Timeline and Evaluation
MVP Implementation: 8 weeks
Production Readiness: 16 weeks
Developer Onboarding Time: 1 day
“The phased approach and structured support from Humanitec were key to our success. From MVP to production readiness, every step was clear and purposeful, and the results speak for themselves.”
– Tumentsatsral Badraa, Platform Team Lead, Mobicom.
Tools and Technology
- Platform Orchestrator: Humanitec
- Workload Configuration: Score
- Version Control and CI/CD: GitLab
- Infrastructure Management: Terraform
- Compute: Rancher, OpenShift
- Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB
- Observability: ELK Stack, Zabbix
Mobicom’s journey with Humanitec has laid a strong foundation for scaling its platform engineering efforts, enabling the team to innovate faster while maintaining operational consistency.
