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The road to a global, unified platform – Interview Dylan

Imagine starting your first job in data. Everything is new and complicated, but incredibly exciting. Then, you get thrown into the deep end, headfirst. That steep learning curve is exactly what happened to Dylan, our .NET Engineer. And he loved every minute of it. 👏🏼

Dylan and co. were working together on an elaborate and large-scale project. Over six months, Dylan helped implement a completely new technology – together with Microsoft Engineers – for a global manufacturing partner. 

Global manufacturing plants

One of our partners, a leading global appliance company with manufacturing plants on different continents, recognized Industry 4.0 has become the new norm and wanted to improve their way of working accordingly.

Running multiple factories scattered all over the globe is challenging on its own. Keeping in mind that every manufacturing plant might operate slightly differently in terms of technology, build different products, or use specialized equipment.

This makes it even more challenging to improve production processes, reduce costs, and minimize carbon emissions. 

Moving towards a global unified platform

Such a platform empowers people with the right tools to build their own scalable solutions that adhere to current IT standards. And this in a harmonized and standardized way, allowing applications to be used across multiple factories and business areas.

Initially, since there was no viable alternative at the time the architecture was designed, Dylan and the platform team were testing one of the systems our partner was currently using. He tested if certain improvements could slowly but surely help reach the goal set out in the scope.

A steep learning curve

However, when Microsoft launched Azure IoT Operations, our interest – from a project perspective – was piqued. Azure IoT Operations could solve challenges with the current data collection implementation and increase the portability of applications between edge and cloud use cases.

Together with a team from Microsoft and other consultants, Dylan helped during the private preview phase of this new product to validate the business value.

Thanks to this shift, Dylan gained extensive knowledge about Kubernetes and GitHub. When he joined the Convolve team back in May 2023, he virtually had no experience with containers, Kubernetes, and cloud workflows. So, for him, this project became his ultimate learning opportunity.

Dylan elaborates: “Getting into the nitty-gritty of Kubernetes, AKS Edge Essentials, and Azure IoT Operations is no small feat. Especially considering I had just a basic grasp on Kubernetes and containers in general.

However, he continues, I love a good challenge and I really put in the effort to familiarize myself with the documentation and materials.” 

What is the result? 

We successfully finalized the pilot phase of the project, connecting a full workflow from manufacturing lines to the unified cloud platform. 

Besides the private preview pilot of Azure IoT Operations, workloads that needed flexible scaling were moved towards AKS Edge Essentials (Edge Kubernetes) using a microservice architecture. This allows services to move between cloud and local deployments with just configuration changes. 

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