The AndPlus Innovation Lab is where our passion projects take place. Here, we explore promising technologies, cultivate new skills, put novel theories to the test and more — all on our time (not yours).
When delivering an application, simply building the source code is only the first step in deploying it. The application must be packaged in a way that can be easily promoted to a live environment somewhere, such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. However, we don't want to rack up charges for running test environments, and we don't want every team member to have access to the production environment. We also want to make it easy for in-progress work to be demonstrated to stakeholders without developers or operations members doing the same repetitive manual steps over and over again. Ideally, we want each feature of a web application to be instantly available on its own URL as soon as a developer pushes their changes.
Containerization is the first step, but isn't enough on its own. We can package our applications as Docker images, but we still need to manage the deployment of those images to be run as container instances. This is where Kubernetes comes in. By declaring in configuration files how our services should be run, we can automate the deployment pipeline and ensure each branch of our webapp is published to our private cloud cluster. We use a reverse proxy called Traefik to dynamically configure routes for our apps based on the branch name (tied to a Jira ticket) and provision SSL certificates via LetsEncrypt so that clients have a secure sandbox to preview changes in.
AndPlus understands the communication between building level devices and mobile devices and this experience allowed them to concentrate more on the UI functions of the project. They have built a custom BACnet MS/TP communication stack for our products and are looking at branching to other communication protocols to meet our market needs. AndPlus continues to drive our product management to excellence, often suggesting more meaningful approaches to complete a task, and offering feedback on UI and Human Interface based on their knowledge from past projects.
