Lenovo Cloud Platform: Highly Available Solution with Multi-layer Microservice Architecture

NIX partnered with Lenovo to build a secure multi-tenant SaaS cloud solution for scalable, agile device management. The platform empowers enterprises to create custom device features and offers tailored solutions for diverse business needs.

Business Domain

Internet Services and Computer Software, Manufacturing
Service

Web Development, Cloud Services
Technologies

AWS

Business Overview

Lenovo is a Fortune Global 500 technology company employing more than 82,000 employees worldwide. With a vision of delivering smarter technology for all, Lenovo has built on its success as the world’s largest PC company by further expanding into key growth areas including server, storage, mobile, software, services and comprehensive solutions.

To help drive device innovation and service transformation, Lenovo’s Cloud & Software (CSW) business develops advanced and emerging software solutions that secure, support, and improve the customer experience with Lenovo technology.

Project Scope

In recent years, Lenovo built its own cloud developer platform to support the development of more creative and customer-centric solutions. By providing a set of reusable core services that are tested and secure, the platform allows developers to focus less time on routine infrastructure-building tasks, and more time on creativity, customization, and the user experience. It is through the cloud developer platform that Lenovo enables developers and strategic partners to easily collaborate and create secure, scalable solutions for enterprise and consumer markets at record speed without compromising on quality or sacrificing innovation.

For one critical project related to this work, Lenovo CSW collaborated with NIX as a proven expert in software development with an emphasis on security to help create one of these reusable services, this one a SaaS cloud-based capability specifically for device management.

Intended for corporations, this solution would need to support high-load data from multiple devices such as laptops and IoT devices, to name a few, and enable IT administrators to manage that fleet effectively, as well as the loaded applications through a single interface. With it, IT teams could provide remote development and deployment of software as well as content across the enterprise’s fleet of devices. To provide the greatest value to Lenovo customers, the solution needed to enable the safe integration of third-party tools and applications, as well as allow for the quick creation of content and applications using pre-built platform tools.

Solution

Building a Highly Available Cloud Solution

After an in-depth analysis of all requirements, the Lenovo CSW and NIX engineering teams worked together to develop a highly available cloud solution with multi-layer microservice architecture to handle millions of requests from devices from around the world smoothly and resiliently.

For the solution, we used the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) DevOps methodology that improves infrastructure consistency, enables full traceability of changes, and makes the entire software development life cycle more efficient.

Working side by side with the Lenovo engineering team, we designed architecture using the AWS Well-Architected framework and AWS best practices. To ensure resilient infrastructure, we did the following:

01 Data Management
02 Microservice Orchestration
03 Security
04 Architecture for Big Data Analytics

01
Data Management

As for efficient and secure data management, the teams chose Amazon RDS and DocumentDB for the simple setup, operation, and scaling of databases in the cloud.

The NIX team ensured automatic information management and high capacity for future data analytics by selecting Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). Furthermore, using ElastiCache aided in improving application performance and eliminating the operational overhead associated with self-managed caching.
02
Microservice Orchestration

The Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) was used to improve operational efficiency and avoid undifferentiated heavy lifting. EKS allowed us to take full advantage of the performance, scale, reliability, and availability provided by AWS infrastructure.
03
Security

The NIX team implemented the Zero Trusted framework approach, which combines advanced technologies such as risk-based multi-factor authentication, identity protection, endpoint security, robust cloud workload technology, and system security maintenance. In the scope of implementation, NIX also considered data encryption, email security, and verifying the hygiene of assets and endpoints before connecting to applications.

For building this solution, the NIX and Lenovo teams used AWS Services such as KMS, IAM roles and permissions, AWS SSO, AWS certificate manager, and security best practices. Furthermore, this approach aided in developing GDPR, PCI, and HIPAA-compliant and robust architecture.
04
Architecture for Big Data Analytics

Amazon S3 was utilized for secure data warehousing, ensuring data availability, high performance, and durability. As for vast data processing and analytics, we used Amazon EMR to simplify running big data frameworks on AWS.

AWS Lambda and Apache Airflow ensure the dynamic provision of big data EMR clusters and compute analytics without using on-demand resources.

Hand in hand, the NIX and Lenovo engineering teams also implemented a series of tools for cost efficiency and an optimized use of resources.

Cost-saving Measures

Dynamic Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

This is a must-have for applications and workloads that require a fast network, quick storage, massive amounts of memory, and high computing capabilities. Spot Instances allow for savings up to 90% of operational costs.

Graviton architecture for an AWS services (EC2, RDS, Elasticache, MSK)

AWS Graviton processors are custom-built by AWS to deliver the best price-performance for cloud workloads. Moreover, enhanced security for cloud applications lowers operating costs for microservices.

Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

On-demand capacity reservations have flexible instance sizes and allow reserving compute capacity for Amazon EC2 instances, thus saving usage costs.

AWS Saving Plans

In exchange for a one- or three-year commitment to hourly costs, these plans help you reduce your bill by up to 72% compared to on-demand pricing.

AWS Karpenter

Karpenter runs only the computing resources required by your cluster applications. It enables Kubernetes clusters to fully utilize the cloud by quickly and easily provisioning computing resources.

Integration of Third-party Solutions

The NIX engineering team is also responsible for integrating third-party solutions—online education tools, device management systems, and more—with the core cloud architecture. Kubernetes and IaC infrastructure ensured secure and segmented integrations that would not affect the core infrastructure. After conducting a thorough analysis with the Lenovo team, we discovered that many of the third-party solutions were not suitable for cloud architecture.

Therefore, we rearchitected on-demand solutions with best-fitting cloud-specific solutions using AWS services and best practices for smooth and secure integration.

Outcome

Outcome

Together, NIX and Lenovo built a newly developed secure multi-tenant SaaS cloud solution, allowing for faster iterations and rapid scaling to meet new demand while providing comprehensive device management solutions for enterprises.

Ultimately, it is a hub for creating device features and customizations and includes more than thirty unique solutions for specific business needs that include support, remote control, and activation for devices.

Team:

135 experts (6 Project Manager, 38 QA Engineers, 25 Java Engineers, 7 .NET Developers, 31 JS Developers, 3 C++ Developers, 2 GO Developers, 23 DevOps)