Is a Multi-Cluster Cloud Environment Right for Your B2B?
Discover what criteria make this type of environment the best choice.
Moving from an on-premises B2B infrastructure to a multi-cluster cloud environment is a big undertaking. But for many companies, it’s a must that is well worth the investment. That was the case for Equinor, an Axway customer that uses Axway B2B Integration Platform to support field lifting, gas transport, and gas trading in Europe.
By looking at what prompted Equinor to adopt a multi-cluster cloud for B2B data exchange, you’ll get a better sense of what criteria make this type of environment the best choice.
✓ Increased message importance
B2B message failures have a more significant impact as the stakes rise. In Equinor’s case, missed messages between fields and systems operators could decrease field production and lead to costly losses. The multi-cluster environment created a high-speed, low-latency infrastructure that is less susceptible to disruption and ensures critical data arrives at its destination.
✓ Increased message volume
Equinor estimated their gas dispatching sent and received somewhere between 2,500 and 3,500 messages every day. These numbers increased by the week. A multi-cluster environment offered a means to change workloads and redirect traffic based on current needs. This infrastructure supported the timely delivery and receipt of higher message volumes.
✓ High availability is critical
Stalled field production is only one example of how message broker downtime leads to costly consequences. Equinor also has to buy gas they don't deliver in a high-priced market and sell at low prices if they provide more gas in a market than needed. In light of this, they needed a message broker that was up and running 99.9 percent of the time — a need that a multi-cluster environment met.
✓ No downtime in patching/upgrades
The goal was to avoid message broker downtime in all respects. That meant looking at application patching/upgrade and server OS patching/upgrade. In an on-premises B2B environment, Equinor experienced critical downtime in this area. With the multi-cluster environment, they can now take down nodes, upgrade every node in the multi-cluster, and then restart them again without disruption.
✓ Need for disaster resilience
What if all three availability zones in the multi-cluster cloud environment went down? Equinor wanted assurance they could maintain a running B2Bi environment. This approach to disaster recovery involved setting up another environment in a sister region. Here, they could import the configuration and be up and running again soon. That way, messages could continue to come through even if all the zones were offline.