To alleviate the situation, Orient Logic worked with the EMIS IT department to redesign the Ministry of Education’s IT landscape based on Red Hat® OpenShift® Kubernetes infrastructure and Agile Integration (link resides outside of ibm.com) tools. The aim was to move toward a new system based on microservices, which would be more modern and more agile, and could be rapidly developed and expanded.
“Everything now runs on OpenShift,” Gogolauri explains, “which operates as a central data integration hub for all applications. This cloud-native technology runs on the Ministry’s own cloud environment. Red Hat integration tools have also been deployed for data exchange, API management and security for integration with external entities. These tools are based on leading open-source projects and provide unmatched capabilities to integrate any systems EMIS might require in future.”
System performance monitoring is also less labor-intensive since implementing IBM® Instana® for observability and application performance monitoring capabilities. “We recently deployed IBM Instana and are very happy with the results and improved visibility,” Gogolauri says. “Now we can see what is causing problems in real time. In case of any deviation from the service level metrics that have been set for applications, Instana sends detailed notifications to the relevant people, who can instantly view the root cause of the problem and immediately start remediation procedures. It is already assisting us in troubleshooting, and significantly improves time to resolution by accelerating identification of the problem. Overall, these tools made it possible for the Ministry to implement any changes rapidly, without breaking the system, even with new software updates.”
“Bugs no longer break the system,” Tatishvili confirms. “Synchronization was very bad before, but now it works flawlessly. It has been almost 11 months since we deployed the Red Hat integration instead of using the legacy data synchronization procedures, and we have not had major problems even once since then.”
Although Georgia has returned to offline learning in a classroom setting, Gogolauri is confident that distance learning could easily be accommodated again: “Teams capability is still present and could be redeployed if necessary. The system is more robust now; if something breaks, the problem is very local and can be rolled back. Some systems are integrated directly through APIs. EMIS used to have a lot of manual deployment, but now it’s all automatic.”