The client’s sales portal had security issues with respect to user logins and incorporated technology making it a security risk. Their demo portal was a web application where sales representatives and Business Partners could log in to book demo resources for showing their product capabilities to potential customers.

Key Challenges :

• Technology upgrade – the client wanted to upgrade the technology stack to use a more modern technology stack. The demo portal was also running on a non-standard production environment that needed to be ported to new infrastructure.
• User management – users had to be manually added into the portal database to gain access. This was causing additional man-hours to be invested in managing users.
• Content Management – Content across the portal was not easily editable. This was causing issues where sales representatives were not having all the data in hand.
• Access management – there was minimal support for RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) on the legacy portal exposing content to unauthorized users.
• Lab management – multiple users couldn’t access the lab servers without booking their slots. This caused delays in customer demos which potentially ended up in losing leads.

GOALS:

• Modernize the application in line with microservices architecture.
• Faster deployment of the services enabling future scalability.
• SSO integration for better user and access management.
• Integration with LDAP for better demo resource Management.
• Real-time communication with the end-users.
• CI/CD set up for minimal downtime during production deployments.

Solution:

• The technology stack was upgraded to Java Microservices and React.
• Microservices were deployed in pods using Kubernetes on the new standard production environment.
• Enabled SSO integration for user login and VDI access to offload the work of environment management.
• Using SSO, users were granted access based on the roles associated with their login.
• Automated resource assignment at the time of the demo to prevent overlap of schedules and have environments dedicated to pre-booked demos.
• Local RBAC implemented at the application level to provide fine-grain control on the content and actions performed by users.
• Real-time notifications (email and push notifications) using Kafka.
• Built DevOps pipelines for CI and CD.
• Analytics & Reports was powered through Firebase.

Results:

It runs on a container architecture that enables it to be elastic, optimizing for both – availability and cost.