Brief about the Client and Product
The client’s product deals with the “Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery” domain.
The product facilitates the enterprises to back up their entire cloud and perform point-in-time restores in case of any disaster or failure.
It can be integrated with OpenStack or Red Hat Virtualization and has the capability to backup and restore entire workloads on-demand.
Tenants can restore individual items, VMs, full workloads, or entire cloud environments via the OpenStack Horizon or the User Interface of Red Hat Virtualization.
One of the prominent features of this solution is the migration of complete workloads from one cloud to another, which is a critical feature for enterprise-level customers.
Kind of Engagement
AFour’s engagement began with the client around 4years ago, with just 2QA members as a team.
At present, it has grown into nearly 20.
The team works across different technical functions, like pre-sales, release management, product development, testing, DevOps, Infrastructure management, and post-sales support.
Key Highlights and Achievements
Over the years of association with AFour, there has been a significant increase in the number of customers of our client, which has increased from 5 to nearly 40 at present.
The client’s customers span across the globe and belong to various domains.
Team Composition
Currently, we have a team of 20 technical members comprising of DevOps & Infrastructure experts, Python Developers, QA, and customer solution engineers.
The team also consists of a manager and a technical architect to look after the overall release activities.
The overall team includes 5 development engineers, 2 DevOps and infrastructure experts, 3 pre-sales and customer solution engineers, and 8 QA members who are involved in making the product work in the OpenStack and Red Hat virtualization.
Project Delivery Process and Communication
On the Delivery front, release planning, estimations, development, and testing activities are done by our team helps to ensure on-time product delivery.
It enables our client to fulfill the commitments they have with respective end-customers.
We have typically two types of releases:
One targeted for the new features which are delivered on a quarterly basis.
Second is the maintenance releases, which are done on-demand basis comprising of bug fixes and enhancements.
Additionally, we follow a flexible delivery model, which helps in efficiently accommodating the AdHOC scope and requirement changes.
This, in turn, helps in reducing the overall time for overall product delivery.
For effective communication and collaboration with the customer, we use tools like Slack, Zoom, and Google Hangouts.
Tools and Technologies Used
The development of the product involves various technologies.
The backend is developed in python, and for frontend HTML, Javascript and CSS are used.
End to end QA is also provided, which involves manual and automation against the functional upgrade, deployment, and performance testing.
The automation used here is also done using python and involves an OpenStack framework, popularly known as tempest.
On the DevOps front, support is provided for multiple distributions and deployment methods against all the available OpenStack releases.