Contino Helps Somos Accelerate Its Cloud Migration With Repeatable Application Development and IaC Deployment Pipelines

The Client

Somos, Inc. is an industry leader in registry management and data solutions that operates the SMS/800 Toll-Free Number (TFN) Registry for over 42 million Toll-Free Numbers. To best support service providers, Somos strives to provide cloud native solutions that maximize performance and efficiencies.

In 2017, Somos successfully migrated the SMS/800 TFN Registry from a mainframe to a more modern, Java-based application stack that resides on a hybrid data center/cloud infrastructure model and is looking to not only fully migrate to the cloud but also modernize a second time to a true microservices architecture.

In Q2 of 2020, Somos approached Contino as a strategic partner to provide expertise and help them with their cloud migration strategy and ensure that they remain in front of the technology wave.

The Challenge

Somos has a large footprint both in AWS and multiple data centers across the country and is looking to exit these data centers and take the costs associated with these data centers into their cloud footprint.

Additionally, Somos is looking to modernize its national registry for Toll-Free Number reservation and provisioning to leverage more cloud native technologies. Refactoring the application and infrastructure would reduce the development cycle times as well as increase the rate at which they deploy applications and related infrastructure.

Somos engineering teams need to be able to spin up infrastructure, networks and related configurations quickly and accurately so that parallel projects can scale successfully. This need for standardization between projects and their related pipelines would improve the ability to support new and existing projects consistently.

The Contino team has been instrumental with assisting us in migrating from an on-prem data center to the cloud. Their professionalism, deep skill set and care have been indispensable to our success.

Gary Mckay, Director of Agile Service Delivery, Somos

The Solution

Through a series of interviews with all employees involved in the Software Delivery Lifecycle (SDLC) process, Contino assessed the current state of Somos engineering. We created a Value Stream map (VSM) which analyzed Somos’ SDLC workflow and related cycle times. This VSM created metrics that Contino and Somos leveraged for this Lighthouse engagement.

Contino then engaged with Somos’ Agile Service Delivery engineering team to provide a solution that targeted these outcomes:

• Developed blueprints and “common pipelines” that can be used across the organization as a templatized process for cross-project repeatability
• Deployed pipelines that included Infrastructure as Code (IaC) model and comment infrastructure, along with application container Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) functionality
• Upskilled development teams with all the necessary automation to get up and running with an IaC project that contains all necessary guardrails
• Strategic guidance on architecturally refactoring an on-prem application to leverage cloud native development practices in AWS

The Business Outcome

In just 12 weeks, Contino and Somos have worked together to reduce the resource needs and cycles required to support their development projects such as:

• Time-to-market: Decreased environment procurement times from 10 days to only 30 minutes
• Efficiency: Fewer resources are now required to set up an environment as procurement has moved from a manual review process to a codified approval mechanism

Alongside these benefits, Contino upskilled the Somos engineering team, strengthening its capabilities of experimentation by tightening feedback loops within their SDLC. Contino’s blueprint for IaC and CI/CD can be replicated amongst engineering teams across the organization.

Somos can now take advantage of cloud native development practices to reduce their data center footprint and focus on increasing their AWS cloud native development and IaC capabilities. The application and its infrastructure are now more highly available, scalable and resilient, which requires less effort to resolve issues.

Somos now has the ability to work through projects in parallel at a faster and repeatable pace, due to these enhanced IaC practices and experimentation culture. The organization is more efficiently able to assist and address customer needs and optimize performance to further support the greater telecom industry.