This week we will be highlighting one of the benefits the migration will bring with a special emphasis on probe and appliance deployments.
Simpler, better, faster
One of the criteria we set ourselves at the outset of this migration was to get rid of bloated solutions that perform tasks in favour of simple solutions that we can build ourselves.
A good example of this is how we changed the way we will be deploying probes and hacker alert appliances in the future.
Currently we use a third-party tool which is widely adopted as the industry standard and performs this task quite effectively.
However, there are some limitations with this tool in that it takes up to two working days before appliances can be delivered successfully. While this was acceptable at the time it was implemented, it is now becoming a burden to our customers and ourselves.
We looked at how we can shorten this period and therefore produced a much simpler solution that would not only solve this issue, but also reduce the bloat in our development stack.
While this solution is remarkably simple, we needed to change our whole flow. Instead of having a centralised place where all appliances are updated from, now the appliances are responsible for updating themselves.
Decentralising this makes it much more scalable and reliable. In summary, we removed a whole lot of complex layers that now makes this all possible.
From the moment a deployment is initiated until the probe or appliance is ready to do its task will now only take 1 hour. This is an acceleration from approximately 48 hours (about 2 days) in the current platform.
We are obviously thrilled with this dramatic improvement!
This will be a huge benefit to our partners as they will be able to set up Lighthouse on the same day that they start deployment.
So why can we only do this now?
Simplifying this is no small feat and has taken many years of discovery to find an optimal solution. In pursuing this we studied many different systems and had to gain architectural insights into the intricacies of how various systems function so that we could find our best way forward.
The bottom line is, we learn over time and constantly improve on the solutions we offer. While our solutions are simple, they solve complex problems that require intelligence, creativity, and experience (time).
Technology requires us to be ever evolving and improving so that we can stay up to date and drive value and remain relevant to both our partners and their customers.