CLOUD AND DEVOPS TECHNOLOGIES

Cloud and DevOps Technologies: The Modern IT Toolkit

At ULX, our guiding principle is that digital transformation requires not just a change of platform, but a complete technological culture shift. While the basic infrastructure is provided by Red Hat solutions (RHEL, OpenShift, Ansible) and EnterpriseDB, true business agility is provided by DevOps technologies and tools based on open standards and the cloud-native development ecosystem.

Basic container technologies and orchestration

Although most of our projects are built on the Red Hat OpenShift platform, our engineering expertise also extends to the fundamental building blocks that started the container revolution. In-depth knowledge of these is essential for implementing hybrid cloud strategies, and we often draw on these basic elements ourselves.

Kubernetes (K8s) – The de facto standard

Kubernetes is the operating system of modern infrastructure. At ULX, we have in-depth knowledge of the capabilities and functionality of "vanilla" Kubernetes, as it is the basis of all container orchestration, including OpenShift, which is 100% Kubernetes-compatible. We help our customers understand the abstraction layers (Pod, Service, Ingress, ConfigMap) and design (and implement) unique architectures that leverage all the benefits of Kubernetes: automatic scaling, self-healing, and declarative configuration management.

Podman – Secure and simple container management

As part of the Red Hat ecosystem, we actively use and support Podman. Podman's daemonless and rootless operation drastically reduces security risks. In many projects where containerization is important but the use of Kubernetes / OpenShift is not justified, we containerize services using Podman.

DevOps Toolchain: From Source Code to Production

The essence of DevOps is continuity. The elements of the DevOps toolchain ensure that source code is quickly and reliably converted into a running service.

Git, GitLab and GitHub – The "Single Source of Truth"

Version tracking is the basis of all automation. During our projects, we help develop Git-based workflows (GitFlow, Trunk-based development). We have decades of experience in GitLab and GitHub implementations, whether on-premise or cloud-based integrations. For us, these tools are not just code repositories, but central elements of our GitOps strategy.

Jenkins and Tekton – CI/CD automation

A build és deploy folyamatok automatizálása egy szoftverfejlesztési projekt kritikus elemei.

  • Jenkins: A classic and extremely flexible solution that we use in environments that include complex legacy systems.

  • Tekton: Cloud-native, Kubernetes-embedded pipeline technology, which is also the basis of OpenShift Pipelines (Tekton-based), helps implement modern, container-based deployment processes.

Cloud-native application development and frameworks

Fast infrastructure is useless if the application is slow. We work with and support technologies that optimize resource utilization and enhance the developer experience.

Quarkus – Supersonic Java

The slow startup and high memory requirements of traditional Java applications have been a barrier to entry in the container world. Quarkus changed that. ULX helps Java developers transition to the Quarkus framework, which:

  • GraalVM ensures lightning-fast startup.

  • It reduces memory requirements to a fraction, allowing more containers to run on the same resources.

  • Its live coding feature radically speeds up development.

Knative and Serverless Architectures

Often, there is no need for continuously running servers. With the help of Knative technology, event-driven systems can be built in the OpenShift environment that only consume resources when a request is received (scale-to-zero). This is the pinnacle of cost efficiency in modern IT.

Messaging and data streams

Robust messaging systems are required for communication between microservices.

Apache Kafka and AMQ

Apache Kafka (and its Red Hat variant, AMQ Streams) is the ideal choice for real-time processing of large amounts of data. At ULX, we have long been involved in the design and implementation of event-driven architectures, where data flows through the system as a stream, enabling real-time analytics and the implementation of loosely coupled systems.

Observability & DevSecOps

In a distributed system, finding a fault can be like looking for a needle in a haystack if we don't have the right tools.

Prometheus and Grafana

Part of implementing a more complex system is metric-based monitoring. Prometheus collects the data, while Grafana makes it visible. We design custom dashboards that can display not only technical KPIs, but also business KPIs.

Helm and Kustomize – Package Management in the World of Kubernetes

Managing Kubernetes manifest files manually is an impossible task. With Helm, we "package" applications so that they can be versioned and easily installed. With Kustomize, we make environment-specific modifications without using templates.