Fieldbox builds scalable cloud infrastructure for 20+ use cases

A leader in offshore energy and floating production systems, sought to accelerate its digital transformation by migrating its infrastructure to the cloud. To support this initiative, the company needed a robust cloud architecture capable of supporting over 20 concurrent use cases across various environments.

To meet these needs, Fieldbox designed and implemented a tailored solution on Microsoft Azure, providing the flexibility and scalability required for the company’s evolving digital ecosystem.

The challenge

When our client began its migration to the cloud, it faced several major challenges:

• The need to implement multiple cloud environments to support the entire lifecycle of the company’s digital solutions.
• A hybrid architecture was needed, as some data sources remained on site, requiring seamless integration between on-premise and cloud systems.
• The architecture had to support more than 20 simultaneous use cases, ensuring scalability while maintaining the reliability required for critical applications, all without compromising performance.

Fieldbox proposition

Fieldbox proposed a customized solution exploiting the full potential of Microsoft Azure to meet the numerous challenges.

• Dedicated Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Clusters: Fieldbox deployed separate AKS clusters for each environment—development, staging, and production—ensuring that each phase of the software lifecycle had its own isolated resources, enabling better resource management and minimized risk of cross-environment issues.
• Enhanced Security: the AKS clusters were made fully private, with private endpoints and private DNS zones, ensuring that all communication between services and environments remained within secure, private networks.
• Network Traffic Management: Fieldbox implemented separate sub-networks with Network Security Groups (NSG) for each environment, allowing for more granular control of traffic flow.
• Hybrid Architecture: as that some of the data needed to remain on-premises, Fieldbox designed a hybrid architecture that securely accessed on-premise data through Azure ExpressRoute, guaranteeing fast and, secure connectivity.
• Advanced Monitoring and Scaling Tools: the use of robust and high performance monitoring tools (Grafana, Loki, Mimir, etc.) and a streamlined scaling capability based on a monitoring configuration generated with CRD’s, ensures high performance and flexibility in handling dynamic Client workloads.
• FinOps Optimization: a dedicated monitoring tool that tracks the usage of cluster and GPU resources in real-time was implemented. This setup is providing SBM with detailed insights into resource utilization, ensuring cost efficiency and effective management of cloud resources.

Results and benefits

The solution delivered by Fieldbox resulted in a highly scalable and secure cloud infrastructure:

• Robust and future-ready infrastructure
  The infrastructure followed Microsoft Azure’s best practices, ensuring a robust foundation for future growth.
• Scalability and performance
  Over 20 use cases were deployed and are now running smoothly on the new architecture, supporting various business functions.
• Enhanced security and access control
  Differential access control across different environments ensured that the company could manage access and security based on project requirements.
• Cost control
  Visibility and control over the infrastructure cost and especially its most expensive components.