Challenge

Keeping an array of technologies in the CI/CD pipeline operating at lightning speed

Solution

Automated observability that works out-of-the box and without a steep learning curve

Results

  • Complete visibility of applications and underlying systems
  • Immediate remediation of incidents, resulting in reduced downtime
  • Time saved helps developers focus on building and deploying quickly, without worry

LiquidShare leverages blockchain technology to offer a best-of-breed financial technological backbone and provides a settlement platform for digitalized assets to custodians, issuers and their agents, asset managers, and market infrastructures. Their mission is focused on enhancing security and transparency across the back-office, enabling the automation and digitalization of core processes for customers.

 

The Challenge:

LiquidShare made a shift from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), due to the added simplicity GCP provided. As a builder of cloud-native microservice software, the move to GCP helped the company recognize a need for more efficient and simpler observability into its software.

“The main focus of the DevOps team is to make sure that the production site is up and running and reliable,” explains Cedric Arnoult, Lead DevOps, for LiquidShare.

The engineering and DevOps teams at LiquidShare leverage a variety of different technologies, including GCP, Java for the back-end, and Angular for the front-end, to build and deploy software from scratch to customers in less than a day.

Operating a continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline at those speeds with an array of different technologies across different developer and engineer teams drives a need for easy to understand, real-time observability into software.

The Solution:

LiquidShare looked at several application monitoring and observability solutions. Instana was quickly selected for its ability to be useful out-of-the box and easy to use for different stakeholders without needing to spend too much time learning the platform. Instana’s platform was also less expensive and complicated than other solutions, such as DataDog, that had been evaluated.

“Instana was perfect in terms of time to production… The main reason to choose Instana was because we wanted to focus on our business, we knew from Instana and the demo, it was exactly what we wanted.” – Cedric Arnoult, Lead DevOps, for LiquidShare.

Additionally, with LiquidShare’s cloud infrastructure now run through GCP, the team was able to add Instana through the GCP marketplace. Instana’s solution and customer success team seamlessly supported LiquidShare’s GCP architecture, simplifying the entire evaluation and onboarding process.

The Results:

“It was really important for us to get something that would be up and running without spending much time and money on it.” – Cedric Arnoult, Lead DevOps, for LiquidShare.

Instana’s Enterprise Observability platform was up and running quickly and easily, with application observability coming in just minutes. Now, LiquidShare’s entire DevOps team makes use of Instana extensively every day to monitor application performance. Additionally, its developers leverage the tracing and graph tools within Instana’s platform daily.

LiquidShare’s focus and KPI is managing application downtime. When an issue arises, Instana’s alerts notify the DevOps team in real-time. For example, prior to adopting Instana, LiquidShare suffered a network downtime incident, and without full visibility or understanding into the issue, it took days of developer time to identify and resolve the issue. Instana’s solution delivers the ability to determine where exactly the problem is located so that immediate steps can be taken to remediate the issue, reducing downtime, and reducing the amount of time developers need to spend on issues like this.

Instana is empowering LiquidShare’s developers, allowing them to save time when it comes to monitoring all resources, including visibility into CPU and memory requests, latency, and tracing.

“With all that time gained from using Instana and all that time that we saved, we just focus on the thing that really matters.” – Cedric Arnoult, Lead DevOps, for LiquidShare.

Using Instana, LiquidShare achieves the observability it needs to on its GCP architecture, making sure applications are running how they should be for customers. This ease-of-use and simplicity for observability results in developers being able to focus their attention on building and deploying customer applications quickly and without worry.

Cedric Arnoult, Lead DevOps, for LiquidShare summarizes his company’s decision to leverage Instana’s observability platform. “Easy, fast, reliable, and I would definitely recommend it.”