NZ Customs completes migration to Govt.Container service from Datacom

The New Zealand Customs Service has migrated its CusMod border management system onto Datacom’s new Govt.Container service.

“We needed a way to adopt rapid application development while working with our existing CusMod system,” says Mathew Black, CIO at NZ Customs.

“Datacom’s containerisation service has allowed us to reduce our application development and release costs, as well as adopt more modern application development and support practices,” says Black.

Bryce O’Kane, associate director of cloud at Datacom, says NZ Customs is the first customer to take up the Govt.Container service, and discussions are now in progress with several others.

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We have already moved from four production releases per year to 25, with the capability to move up to multiple production releases per day if requiredMathew Black, NZ Customs

Towards a DevOps approach

Black says Datacom also supported the agency’s move towards a DevOps approach, which is a much more agile and responsive way for their developers to work. “We’re already seeing the results, which include productivity gains from faster and more frequent application releases.”

“We have already moved from four production releases per year to 25, with the capability to move up to multiple production releases per day if required,”says Black, in a statement.

Datacom says the container service helps organisations that are looking to move their IT applications, platforms and infrastructure to the cloud make strong early progress across a wider range of their operations than before.

In the case of NZ Customs, Govt.Container enables a more agile response to the high volume and complex border security environment that NZ Customs operates in, says Datacom.

Datacom’s Govt.Container service uses containers, a relatively new technology in New Zealand, to provide increased agility for cloud transformation of heritage applications with the support of modern application development and DevOps.

Using Datacom’s Govt.Container product allows NZ Customs to focus on their day-to-day business of application development while Datacom takes care of deployment, upgrades, and ongoing patch management of the underlying platform in the background.

Containers package and isolate applications with the files they need to run, enabling faster development and more frequent releases.

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As more businesses seek to digitise their customer offerings, the need for DevOps’ pipelines with automated build, test and deployment of application releases will increase, side by side with the demand for containerised solutionsBryce O’Kane, Datacom

Bryce says the Govt.Container service has two key purposes.

“A core function is to allow faster development and more frequent releases of older legacy systems, but the other growth area is new applications being built on containers, as this allows developers to work far more quickly,” says Bryce.

“As more businesses seek to digitise their customer offerings, the need for DevOps’ pipelines with automated build, test and deployment of application releases will increase, side by side with the demand for containerised solutions.”

Datacom’s Govt.Container service uses Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) which allows developers to quickly develop, build, deploy and manage containerised services and applications in a safe and secure cloud environment.

The container service is built around a core of application containers powered by Docker, with orchestration and management provided by Kubernetes (a container orchestration system for Docker), and on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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