MULTI-CLOUD INCORPORATION:

SCALING UP TO MEET MARKET DEMANDS

Integrating AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, leveraging the IoT Hub, and having a defined and scalable architecture to give Delta the ability to scale up quickly to meet customer & market demands.

Delta Faucet is a long-time hardware manufacturing company that produced the first single-handle faucet. They are the first to advertise a faucet in print and bring to market the first domestically produced kitchen faucet pull-out. Since introducing the pull-out faucet, Delta Faucet has continued bringing innovative products to market with the consumer in mind. Delta Faucet’s innovative products aim to transform daily life and how you interact with water, making every moment spent in the kitchen or bathroom one to remember.

Delta’s Innovation group – First Wave – is where they launch new products and innovations into the market to meet customer demands and keep pace in the digital landscape. In 2018, Delta Faucet launched its voice-activated faucet. The success of the voice-activated faucet and the accelerating trend toward digital products led Delta to re-envision the platform to scale & grow its digital products and services. Delta’s industry is shifting from mechanical only to digitally enhanced (smart faucet) to fully digital (Smart Home); to keep pace, Delta needed to expand its digital footprint.

challenges

Integrating Three Cloud Services into One

CleanSlate needed to bring 3 different, isolated technologies together (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud) and make them work securely & efficiently in a way that is naturally performant for the user who wants to receive an immediate voice response while bouncing between all clouds to get the answer & get the answer quickly.

Maintaining Complex Environments

There were too many different tech stacks to manage and not enough people to manage them. CleanSlate came in and consolidated the tech stack in order to better manage the tech stacks & skillsets by using a common language across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Transitional Changes/Growing Pains

There was a time delay between the initial MVP product launch and beginning to scale. As growth occurred, some of the systems Delta depended on were going out of date. Transitioning to enterprise-scale technology development and updating those new version systems, not just technologies, were challenging.

Standardization & Automation of Environments

There was a need to standardize the environments and automate both the creation and management of those environments in order to support scalable enterprise-size teams running in parallel with one another.

Solutions

Centralizing Cloud Services into Azure

CleanSlate encapsulated almost everything into Azure, hosting on a combination of Azure Functions and Azure App Services. The back-end logic, functionality, and data systems reside in Azure – while the Voice Skills and some performance-enhancing components exist within AWS & Google Cloud. This provided scalability and flexibility to write and develop those web services in different languages as well – some were in .net and Node. We were able to secure things more easily as a team, work more efficiently, and provide a better-performing system that had fewer points of failure that was able to recover problems more successfully when and if they did occur.

Leveraging to IoT Hub

By leveraging the IoT Hub for all of our IoT communications, CleanSlate was able to communicate efficiently with low-power devices with MQTT messages, both up and down. Those messages were then translated to messages in our internal message queue system that were then able to bounce around our internal system for processing on the backend.

Defined & Scalable Architecture

CleanSlate put definition and structure into the environment. We added IaC so we were able to repeat it and build out their different environments. Instead of taking months to understand and reproduce part of an environment, we can now build a brand-new isolated environment in less than 2 days; sometimes in less than 2 hours.

Results

Centralizing the cloud services into Azure, leveraging the IoT Hub, and having a defined and scalable architecture gives Delta the ability to scale up as quickly as needed to meet customer and market demands. By standardizing, defining, and scaling the architecture and implementing multi-cloud incorporation, CleanSlate:

  • Implemented Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) that made it possible to create multiple environments and have multiple development teams working concurrently
  • Consolidated the tech stack and were able to reuse some of the CI/CD platforms:
    • Unit Testing Pattern
    • Build Processes
    • Release Processes
  • Standardized the architecture for better, proactive monitoring to improve capabilities and site reliability
  • Moved faster with patterns in place, ensuring the right quality control measures were in place before the app headed into production, leading to better app quality

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