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New Relic Scales Their Software Platform Quickly with Docker and Creates New Tools Designed For Dockerized Applications
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Factory Operations Visibility & Intelligence
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
As New Relic anticipated their future growth, they saw it as an opportunity to rethink their own application architecture. This led New Relic to morph their existing monolithic application components into a service-oriented architecture with a goal of increasing their number of software deployments each day. At the same time, they were planning to greatly increase their infrastructure and launch new products and features into the marketplace. As a SaaS company, these transitions were not taken lightly, as any changes to the existing infrastructure and services instantly touches their customers. To aid in this transition, the Site Engineering group, including – Sean Kane Lead Site Reliability Engineer Karl Matthias and Sean Kane, along with several product teams, started to investigate Docker, the open platform to build, ship and run distributed applications.
About The Customer
New Relic is a software analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics about millions of applications in real time. Their comprehensive SaaS-based solution provides one powerful interface for web and native mobile applications and consolidates the performance monitoring data for any chosen technology in an environment. Their customers use their cloud solution every day to optimize more than 200 billion metrics for 3 million applications. When your brand and customer experience depend on the performance of modern software, New Relic provides insight into your overall environment.
The Solution
New Relic adopted Docker, the open platform to build, ship and run distributed applications. As early adopters of the Docker platform, the team even custom-built an open source project called Centurion as a deployment tool that contributed to the Docker community. That tooling was integrated into their original proof of concept deployment pipeline, which was built on Docker and formed the platform for their new application release process. Today there are over 75 New Relic production services that run on Docker both in New Relic’s own data center and in the Amazon Web Services cloud. Containers are always spinning up and down depending on what new features are being deployed and each application team is able to deploy containers on demand.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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