Modernizing Application Delivery for a Global Manufacturing Leader

Problem Statement

The client is the Global Capability Center (GCC) of a leading global manufacturer of identification, safety, and workplace productivity solutions, supporting enterprise applications, DevOps operations, and infrastructure engineering across global business functions.

To address inconsistent application provisioning and manual server configuration, the GCC partnered with Polestar Analytics to drive application delivery modernization and build a standardized framework for application deployment automation for its OpenMage application.

Key Challenges

• Manual Server Provisioning: Repeated installation and configuration increased engineering effort and created inconsistencies.
• Lack of Standardization: No reusable VM image or deployment blueprint led to environment drift, limiting application modernization efforts.
• Inefficient Deployments: Manual intervention slowed release cycles and increased configuration risks.
• High Maintenance Effort: Updates, dependency upgrades, and patching required significant manual effort.
• Limited Scalability: Provisioning new environments was time-consuming and difficult to scale across enterprise applications.

Solution Implemented

• Standardized VM Image: Created a reusable image with Ubuntu, MariaDB, Redis, PHP, and required dependencies to support application modernization for manufacturing companies.
• Docker Compose Runtime: Established a standardized application runtime with shared NFS storage.
• CI/CD Image Pipeline: Automated VM image creation and updates through version-controlled CI/CD, enabling automated application deployment.
• Automated Provisioning: Enabled repeatable deployments using standardized, validated configurations, supporting automated infrastructure provisioning for enterprise applications.
• Improved DevOps Governance: Created a controlled framework supporting collaboration across engineering, infrastructure, QA, release management, and business application teams, strengthening GCC DevOps automation and GCC infrastructure automation.