Application Modernization

Inkling is a leader in digital learning and the creator of the Inkling Digital Learning Platform—a solution used by leading enterprises such as McDonald’s, Elsevier, Verizon, and H&R Block. The company has been awarded with some of the learning industry’s top citations and accolades, and has seen its solution adopted across a myriad of industries, from healthcare and insurance to retail and manufacturing.

BitPusher was originally hired to help provide operational support to Inkling’s engineering team during a period of expanded hiring needs. With a platform used by millions of users worldwide, Inkling was in need of operational assistance and receptive to feedback regarding the optimization of its infrastructure and services architecture. During the course of learning Inkling’s technology stack and integrating with the team members, BitPusher acquired enough knowledge to help the company design a revamped infrastructure which would be much easier to manage and cheaper to operate. This was a critical initiative for Inkling, as they required a world class service architecture to support its expansive portfolio of marquee customers—some of the world’s greatest brands across a wide range of industries. As a result of BitPusher’s expert guidance, Inkling was able to reconfigure and optimize its service architecture for more simplified management and support of containerized workloads and services.

The Challenge

Modern IT environments can accumulate underlying complexities over time like geological layers; if not managed carefully, this stratification could result in excessive management complexity and overhead, an increased mean time to repair (MTTR), scaling issues, and security gaps, just to name a few. For Inkling, a significant amount of custom tooling for deploying microservices, managing configurations, and routing network traffic was in play—this made its environments exceedingly difficult to manage, troubleshoot, and change/update.

“BitPusher took the lead in developing a ‘grand plan’ to modernize Inkling’s cloud infrastructure.”

— Ariel Zach, CTO of Inkling

As a result, the company found itself hindered in its ability to identify and address operational weaknesses such as broken redundancies and suboptimal backend processes. Additionally, Inkling also had multiple generations of deployment styles running concurrently, making for a substantially convoluted and complicated patchwork quilt of supporting technologies and architectures in the mix. BitPusher systematically identified the operational needs addressed by this complexity, and designed a much simpler, coherent architecture which addressed all of those needs – as well as determining how to get to make the changes without creating service issues along the way.

The Solution

Because much of the management complexity was caused by an excess of internally-developed solutions, BitPusher quickly determined that a large number of these legacy tools should be replaced with standardized solutions developed on a Kubernetes-based platform. This would allow Inkling to support modern containerization technologies and DevOps processes—a capability in alignment with the preferences of Inkling’s engineers and management, as they would bear the day-to-day responsibility of continuously improving and optimizing the platform and its underlying technologies.

Results and Benefits

BitPusher started with documenting Inkling’s vision and goals for the engagement, followed by developing a high-level plan with milestones. Throughout the process, BitPusher worked alongside Inkling in a highly collaborative mode; for BitPusher, it was critical that detailed plans were co-designed between the two firms, as work would be assigned elastically to Inkling or BitPusher engineers based on skills, availability, and shifting budgets. As a result, Inkling is rolling out a containerized environment that they fully own—this time, with a higher confidence level, at a faster speed, and addressing the full set of operational concerns from day one.

BitPusher is a DevOps company offering project work and ongoing management at a higher quality and lower, more predictable cost than consultants or in-house teams. Over the past 20 years Bitpusher has developed a delivery model based on reusable engineering components and a collaborative approach which allows for the right combination of availability, scalability, security, performance, and a cost-efficient use of hosting resources.

BitPusher is an advanced tier AWS consulting partner, an AWS public sector partner, and part of the AWS solution provider program.