This is a fully loaded question which we can only begin to summarise here. The length of time we have spent on this migration illustrates the scope and complexity of what we need to deal with to achieve this task and illustrates the enormity of what Guardian360 has created over the years.

Since Lighthouse was first developed much has changed both in the technological arena and within our business itself. Guardian360 had grown to serving over 1000 customers with over 150 partners using our platform as part of their service offering.

We began to realise that our architecture, while it is still up to the task, needs an overhaul to handle our projected growth we foresee happening in the future.

Not only that, but with the advent of big data and machine learning, and offering more complex reporting within our system, we would need to position ourselves to be ready to handle much more complex queries than we currently do.

Much preparation was done to investigate the most current and up to date solutions which would address our immediate concerns which are an exponential improvement in:

–  Availability – in a monolithic structure a single point of failure can bring down the whole system – by implementing containerised technology we can deal with failures in a way that does not affect the end user.

–  Reliability – this is the result of many little things done well – things such as

o  making our implementation cloud agnostic

o  eliminating human error through automation

o  using operational frameworks like GitOps

o  spreading out our resources on many containers

o  automated and daily backups are created for all services and are integrated with one another

–   Scalability – rapid deployment and automating tasks means that we can deal with a larger base of customers at once, by simplifying our architecture we can handle more at a time

–  Automation – technological advances means that we do not need to perform all the tasks we did in the past – by implementing automation solutions we can spend our time better delivering value to our customers who are the driving force of our entire platform

–  Security – we have implemented hardening at every layer of the product as all the components of our migration has taken place

–  Observability – how does one make improvements if you cannot measure your success rate? This has been at the core of all we have implemented – not only does this give us more insights into our own infrastructure, but the capabilities we will glean from this will be passed on in valuable insights for the product we offer to help our customers understand what is happening in their own networks

These ideas and technologies do not work independent of each other but form a symphony in which each part supports the success of the whole stack.

One of the solutions, Kubernetes, which we have implemented is based on Google’s Borg infrastructure mentioned in their SRE Book which is a sacred resource here at Guardian360. https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/. If you want to get deep into understanding Kubernetes, then this is a very good intro into where it comes from.

We began this implementation at the end of 2022 and while much of this will take place with a proverbial flip of a switch, there has been much done in the current infrastructure that is currently live and is already producing some great benefits to what our clients are experiencing now.