EVBox is a producers of electric vehicle charging stations and has these come bundled with a managed software solution. Originally founded in 2010 in the Netherlands they are experiencing a tremendous growth. This has also resulted in them needing to redesign their cloud infrastructure to scale towards the future.
Given the fact that the Philips Hue Cloud is somewhat alike (hardware + cloud offering) and also being ran on Kubernetes they reached out to us to request a workshop to address specific needs and get their engineering team up to speed.
Challenges
Given the fact that EVBox is expanding rapidly they have experienced a lot of growing pains in their DevOps way of working. Getting code shipped to production became more difficult and assessing that it is working as expected using metrics instead of tapping logs quickly becomes cumbersome.
We have split the day into two parts: the morning was geared towards broad Kubernetes knowledge, how to use it and be able to observe the system to decide upon the right course of action. This to facilitate the OODA loop in the development process using Kubernetes.
In the afternoon we had more specific topics to discuss like how to do global rollouts (multi-region), improve network-based security using networkpolicies and ofcourse discuss the hot and upcoming: Istio service-mesh. What it contains and why you want to use it.
All in all we had a great day of sharing knowledge, discussing unsolved issues and how to approach this. It was great to see the passion in the team at EVBox and quality they strive to deliver.
Slides
Got interested in the challenges that EVBox is solving? They are growing rapidly and can always use skilled software engineers.