Husqvarna Group.

The client.

Husqvarna Group is a global leading producer of outdoor power products and innovative solutions for forest, park and garden care. Products include chainsaws, trimmers, robotic lawn mowers and ride-on lawn mowers.

Challenges.

When moving into the service and IoT space, Husqvarna highlighted a need to create a faster to release origination in a cost-efficient manner and so they pursued building their new platform using a cloud-infrastructure to gain advantages in areas such as agility and cost.

After consulting with AWS, Nordcloud was recommended to Husqvarna as their cloud partner and began working with their Digital Service Solutions team (DSS) to develop a platform to manage their IoT infrastructure.

Solutions.

The journey began with a high-level overview to what is the cloud, its benefits, how does it compare to on-prem, and the differences between the various cloud platforms.

After building a strategy we moved on to ways of working such as continuous practices, automation, and some agile practices mainly from a DevOps perspective. We gave architectural guidance on how to build applications for the cloud that maximises its benefits from the perspectives of cost, time-to-market, and agility before moving to the implementation and ownership of a Delivery Pipeline and related developer tooling, a cloud foundation and cloud automation whilst acting as the Core Team.

The solution was primarily built upon Docker with ECS and DynamoDB, but also used ELB, RDS, Kinesis, Lambda. Bridging the gap between the people and cultures of Development and Operations is always a good thing so we aimed to unify understanding of modern software development and release practices.

As this was a greenfield endeavour we leveraged the cloud to gain the benefits of a DevOps culture and our goal was to automate everything.

The end goal was Continuous Deployment but when not possible Continuous Delivery, and in order to gain that level of automation it required a fairly comprehensive software-defined data centre (SDDC).

Results.

The solution has created a platform that delivers the required scalability, processing capabilities of big data, and faster time to market, all in a cost-effective manner.

By working with Nordcloud and AWS, Husqvarna’s team have been able to spend their time on core business activities and plan for future product launches built upon the infrastructure.

In addition, through close collaboration with Husqvarna we’ve enabled their dev teams to harness the power of AWS by helping them understand how to best use AWS resources and establish a development and release pattern based on agile and continuous principles.

Currently the developer tooling setup (consisting of Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Bamboo) is coordinating work in over 10 AWS accounts.