Tata Consultancy Services - Best Technical Support Strategy and Implementation

Company: Tata Consultancy Services, Mumbai
Company Description: Tata Consultancy Services is an Indian multinational information technology services and consulting company
Nomination Category: Information Technology Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Technical Support Strategy and Implementation

Nomination Title: Reimagining TCS IT to Innovate Business Model

TCS is a US-$22B organization with 488K+ employees in 46 countries supporting 1000+ global-customers. Supporting the global operations of TCS is its Corporate IT unit-Ultimatix. In line with the organization’s vision of 100% agile way of working by 2020, Ultimatix started its digital transformation journey to establish ‘Purpose-centric, resilient, adaptable’ future-ready IT unit.

Ultimatix caters to 250+products globally and it was a huge challenge to bring about digital transformation at this scale. The transformation began with rethinking of existing architecture and design principals to gain enterprise agility and take advantage of new technologies. This led the emergence of a digital backbone called Ultimatix Digital Core to enable Purpose Centric Architecture.

Ultimatix brought change by

Implemented Micro-Mini Services for Scalability

Prior to Digital-Core transformation, Ultimatix products were monolith applications. As part of Micro-Mini transformation each application was broken into purpose centric services, each catering to a specific business-need. For-example, Travel-management system broken down into flight-services, transport-services, visa-services etc. This enables Ultimatix to achieve agility, elasticity, fault tolerance and resiliency. Micro-Mini services was implemented using Spring-boot and Netflix-OSS components.

Stateless Architecture for elasticity

At Ultimatix, we assessed applicability of stateless-architecture in products by identifying high-scalability, elasticity, availability needs in a product. This enabled applications to be easily redeployed in the event of failure and scaled out to accommodate load changes without worrying about the session-stored in server’s JVM. Stateless-architecture was implemented using Spring-session and Redis as external session-store.

Dynamic Configuration for response for better manageability

Ultimatix implemented Dynamic Configuration using Netflix Archaius to overcome static updates; thus ensuring that a configuration change could be done-on-fly without impacting availability of an application.

DevOps and CICD for quick response to change

As part of DevOps, Ultimatix came up with its own DevOps-maturity model which covered practices like Continuous-Integration, Continuous-Delivery, Continuous-Production, DevSecOps, ChatOps. All the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes were automated enabling building, testing and releasing application rapidly, frequently, and reliably. A central DevOps team was created to work closely with Dev and Ops team to bridge the gaps and provide necessary foundational activities-as-a-service

Blu- Green Deployment for improved availability and response to change

Ultimatix adopted Blue-green deployment and ensured that all the user traffic is redirected to new version of application, when made live, within fraction-of-seconds and thus ensuring 100% availability for an application during planned downtimes. Blue-Green deployment in Ultimatix was implemented-via VM-scale sets in public-cloud.

Deployment with Containers forportability

Ultimatix replaced application’s web and servers with Containers. All required application binaries along with its dependencies are self-contained within the individual con tainer images. Containers enables Ultimatix to improve portability, ensure better performance, enable optimum RAM/disk-space/cloud utilization, support agile-environment, eliminate environment inconsistencies. Ultimatix used Docker to achieve containerization.

Fault-Tolerance for system resiliency

In a micro/mini services architecture, there can be cases where some of the many dependent services may fail. Hence there is a need for a latency and fault tolerance in application design. Ultimatix used Netflix Hystrix which helped in achieving fault tolerance by isolating points of access between the services, stopping cascading failures across them, and providing-fallback options. These features of Hystrix improve application’s overall resiliency.

Usage Analytics & telemetry for response to change, user-experience

As part of Usage Analytics & Telemetry, we gather data on user-behavior, application-behavior, and infrastructure-monitoring and feed the same back to our monitoring, analytics-systems where they are analyzed to take appropriate action-based on feedback.

For-example: the telemetry component to monitor infrastructure usage records high-CPU Utilization of a server and sends the data-back to the system, where trigger is raised to provision more instances to the IaaS layer.

Ultimatix Adopted this cloud-native architecture for all products through our own code framework-“DigiFrame”. It is reusable cloud native-code-framework which enables product teams to be onboarded on Digital Core standardized platform. DigiFrame provides all technologies, design-patterns needed to implement Digital core. It also includes sample app-based on Digital-Core principles for all products for faster adoption of Digital-Core.

Digital-Core implemented for key applications with 80% usage , accounting for 358k+ users using apps hosted on Digital Core.

Cost savings:
CPU utilization reduced from 29% to 6%
Memory utilization reduced from 63% to 41%

Enhanced user experience
Concurrency improved from 40K to 100K users with 42% less infrastructure
For TCS internal performance evaluation application, concurrency improved by 56

Faster time to market with automated touchless deployments
95% reduction in IT-Delivery change lead-time
90% savings in manual efforts for selected SDLC-processes
100% applications performing automated code review & Static app security testing
77% improvement in application-availability
1.42 Average-CI rate/day
14471 total automated-production releases done in 24-months

Availability of products in TCS increased to 99.95%

Zero-downtime during planned deployments through Blue-green deployments.
220+ blue-green-deployments increasing availability

AnytimeAnywhere deployment thereby enabling faster-time to market

100% readiness for deployment(Business-hours to non-business-hours)
Reduction in environment-provisioning time by 76% and infra-provisioning-time by 95%