Not On The High Street

The Solution

Our partnership incorporated both Discovery and Delivery phases.

Discovery

This took the form of face-to-face conversations (with technical and non-technical people, at all levels) and workshops (including a tour of their current technology set-up). From this we were able to ascertain which aspects of their tech stack were working well, and which areas required attention. Keeping their goals in mind, our subsequent recommendation was to incrementally move towards a Microservices-style architecture and approach.

Delivery

Following acceptance of the proposed approach, the NOTHS team invited us to carry out the delivery. This began with the building of a POC (proof-of-concept) where particular attention was paid to working closely with the NOTHS team, incorporating techniques such as pair programming along the way. Our intention was to prove the suitability of the recommended approach and technologies, whilst affording NOTHS an opportunity to gain knowledge of architectural best practices.

After demonstrating a successful POC, we proceeded to begin the incremental work of moving their application stack to a fully-operational, elastic architecture.

In doing this – and through a series of hands-on workshops and knowledge-sharing sessions – we were also able to help the NOTHS team adopt new development approaches and patterns, such as behaviour-driven design (BDD), distributed and cloud-native software, event sourcing and CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation).

Finally, in order to ensure that NOTHS could support and further develop their new tech stack, we guided the recruitment and training of a new Java-based development team.

With the above implementation completed, we continued our partnership with the NOTHS team for a further six months, helping them to complete their technology transformation into a leading-edge platform. This involved the migration of NOTHS’ existing infrastructure to the AWS public cloud; with automation and infrastructure-as-code forming an integral part of the final solution.

Technologies employed were Docker, Apache Mesos, Mesosphere Marathon, Chronos, HashiCorp Consul and Packer, Ansible and various AWS services.