EPAM Leverages the Cloud to Enhance Its Global Delivery Model

EPAM Leverages the Cloud to Enhance Its Global Delivery Model

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EPAM Systems partnered with Nimbula to perfect the quality and performance of its global delivery model via a federated cloud.

EPAM's Business Situation

EPAM Systems is a leading global software engineering and IT consulting provider. Headquartered in the United States, the company employs over 7,300 IT professionals and operates development centers and branch offices in Belarus, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, UK, Germany, Kazakhstan, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, and Canada.

EPAM decided to build, deploy, and manage a community cloud. The cloud addresses the company’s need to increase productivity, quality and cost-effectiveness of delivering its services, and project and infrastructure management.

The Challenges:

EPAM undertook the task of augmenting its core services with private cloud services to:

• Create a scalable infrastructure as a key ingredient to EPAM’s Software Product Development Services.
• Streamline the process of infrastructure provisioning at all stages of the software delivery process.
• Improve the speed, quality and predictability in the way EPAM delivers software. Specifically, the ability to create sandboxes, test environments or the entire production deployments instantly.
• Eliminate reuse of manually provisioned and configured resources to avoid inconsistent software that behaves differently on the development, testing, staging, and production cycles.
• Increase productivity by allowing projects to rapidly provision as many instances of the systems as needed. This feature is especially useful for Quality Assurance purposes, as testing engineers often need more than one instance/version of the system.
• Integrate IaaS and other infrastructure components: internal and external user and project identity management; change management; usage control and billing; Continuous Integration and Delivery, testing, and other PaaS and SaaS offerings.
• Integrate third-party IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS software to automate operations from a single pane of glass.

The Solution:

EPAM Cloud Competency Center partnered with Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System company, to deploy a geographically distributed community cloud with sites in the US and Europe. EPAM used the company's flagman product Nimbula Director. The solution features:

• Secure and scalable compute and storage capacity. Nimbula Director rapidly unified EPAM’s globally distributed infrastructure in a secure, out-of-the-box manner.
• Multi-tenancy, high-performance and resiliency. With a resilient control plane, the solution provides a flexible and reliable multi-tenancy model without degrading performance.
• Elasticity and on-demand resource availability. Nimbula Director provides a self-service, elastic cloud. The switch in infrastructure is completely transparent and performance bottlenecks are removed, EPAM is now able to increase or decrease capacity within minutes.
• Federation with other private and public clouds. Nimbula Director enables federation to Amazon EC2 addressing EPAM’s requirement to enable more choices for clients and providing extra capacity for peak times and global reach.

EPAM has developed an EPAM Orchestration, a project and process management solution. EPAM Orchestration helps define and manage all aspects of provisioning resources and application components for all software development lifecyce stages.

This automated solution integrates with Nimbula Director’s RESTful APIs. The integration enables resource provisioning, identity management, change management, usage control and billing, Continuous Integration and Delivery, testing, and access to third-party service offerings.

The Outcome:

The cloud increased the efficiency of the EPAM’s global delivery model:

• Rapid cloud onboarding. It takes EPAM 15 minutes to create an initial system architecture known as a “project template” for a new customer or project.
• apid system deployment. Using project templates, an authorized developer, QA specialist or systems engineer can deploy the entire solution in minutes. The project manager has a complete control over costs and changes.
• Continuous improvement. A project template is continuously enriched with instructions for elasticity, automated software deployment, testing and monitoring. It is integrated with Continuous Integration and Deployment processes.
• Always production ready. Templates evolve with projects providing instant fully automated deployment capabilities for all project stages. This helps EPAM create “always production ready” solutions effectively represented by multiple versioned production instances. Some of the solutions are used exclusively for production, others for development, testing or other purposes.
• Collaboration. EPAM often co-develops solutions with customers and partners. EPAM Orchestration and Nimbula Director provide multi-tenancy and multi-cloud capabilities. This helps the EPAM’s team and customers to work in tandem.

EPAM leveraged Nimbula Director to increase productivity, quality and cost-effectiveness of its services. Nimbula Director is seamlessly integrated into the EPAM’s proprietary management suite bridging the gap between the project management and the infrastructure management.