Traefik Enterprise was selected by AmeriSave Mortgage Corporation, one of the fastest-growing privately-held mortgage lenders in the nation, to underpin the networking required to migrate and run applications from 150 servers in its datacenter to microservices deployed on Microsoft Azure.
AmeriSave is in the midst of migrating its applications to an Azure Red Hat OpenShift cluster to increase reliability and security, while reducing the effort required to deploy containers at scale. Applications are transitioned, at first, to microservices that are deployed on-premises with Docker Swarm.
The next phase of the migration involves moving workloads one-by-one, migrating the microservices to the Azure cloud computing platform. Moving traffic quickly between Docker Swarm and OpenShift, however, turned out to be problematic. First, AmeriSave looked into Azure Traffic Manager, a DNS-based traffic load balancer, and Azure API Management, an API management platform. The solution could reroute traffic between OpenShift and Swarm. However, it was cumbersome to use as single configurations involved hundreds of lines of code. The lack of automation would become exponentially more complicated when used by hundreds of services.
Maciej Miechowicz, senior vice president of enterprise architecture at AmeriSave, and his team evaluated and selected Traefik Enterprise to underpin the networking required to aid in migrating the environment.
During the migration period, AmeriSave built a two-layer architecture that allows them to transition to Kubernetes while still running production environments in Docker. Using Traefik Enterprise, AmeriSave is able to transfer traffic at high throughput between microservices deployed in Docker Swarm on-premises and microservices deployed in OpenShift on Microsoft Azure.
“Our current two-layer setup with Traefik Enterprise is working miracles for us,” said Miechowicz. “We’re amazed at how well Traefik Enterprise works. It would not be possible to instantly rollback applications that misbehave without Traefik Enterprise.”
Traefik Enterprise is drastically more simple to configure, lightweight, and can be fully automated. The platform is also easy to scale on demand, as the team can elastically add or remove nodes as needed. If a problem occurs during migration, the deployment can be instantly rolled back in one click. Also, unlike NGINX that was used previously, Traefik Enterprise does not have to be reloaded every time a single service’s configuration is updated, losing requests in the process. This makes applications more resilient by eliminating service interruptions.
“This is exactly the type of instance where Traefik Enterprise excels,” said Emile Vauge, founder and CEO, Traefik Labs. “Traefik overcomes the limitations of traditional networking technologies, which lack features like service discovery, dynamic configuration, and routing automation — all of which are important to address the highly dynamic nature of microservices architectures.”
Authentication delegation and custom pathing resources are two features AmeriSave has found particularly useful. Traefik Enterprise centralizes authentication delegation, meaning each application does not have to individually authenticate. Advanced routing options, such as custom pathing, give AmeriSave flexibility in configuring complex path schemes for routing traffic to applications.
AmeriSave is still in the midst of migrating its applications into the OpenShift environments in the cloud. All new services being migrated to containers are routed through Traefik Enterprise. Once the migration is complete, Traefik Enterprise will handle 40,000 requests per second for AmeriSave. The team has not experienced any service interruptions with Traefik Enterprise to date. AmeriSave continues to migrate to the cloud to support its digital mortgage experience for their customers.
Traefik Labs develops the world’s most popular cloud-native application networking stack. Traefik’s modern approach to networking helps developers and operations teams of all sizes build, deploy and run modern microservices applications quickly and easily across data centers, on-premises servers and public clouds from the origin to the edge. Used by the world’s largest enterprises, Traefik Proxy is one of Docker Hub’s top 10 projects, with over 3 billion downloads.
Founded in 2016, Traefik Labs is backed by investors including Balderton Capital, Elaia, 360 Capital Partner, and Kima Ventures.
