How Softswitch Provider Adopted Infrastructure-as-Code alpacked

About Softswitch Provider
Softswitch Provider(SP) is one of the first companies which developed a Softswitch - software responsible for VoIP calls management, accounting, configuration, integrations and others.

SP has written a Softswitch core with C++ in the early 2000s which is still in use in production. SP provides a managed Software service. Customer purchases a licence for their software and SP does the rest.

Challenge
SP spins up a new server for each client, installs dependencies for its web interface (ruby), softswitch (c++) and various maintenance scripts (python and perl).

Softswitch required a lot of software being installed, configured and maintained which started to be out of the hands of support and infrastructure teams. Each new sell or security patch release required tens of hours to roll out and usually brought mistakes caused by manual work.

Solution
Alpacked made a discovery and decided to implement an Infrastructure-as-Code approach for SP. Considering the existence of Python dependencies everywhere in SP environment and specialists with corresponding skills, it was decided to choose Ansible.

We "translated" internal documentation into ansible roles, tasks and playbooks, added an IaC continuous testing process with Molecule and helped SP to determine the appropriate processes that need to be implemented in Ops teams in regards to the new approaches.

Find out 4 main steps of IaC adoption:

Outcomes
IaC adoption improved the overall delivery quality for SP. It speeded up the full-package delivery and helped SP to focus on customer needs and business tasks instead of keep struggling with provisioning.

IaC adoption also provided SP with the ability to improve the processes in Ops team in general - implement Code review, Incident reaction practices, etc.

Read more about internal quality control practices in our article.