Accelerating Growth Through Dependable Site Reliability Engineering

A transformative approach with the availability to optimize system performance and deliver exceptional services.

5 min read

Project Details

Fluidra stands as a global leader in the pool and wellness industry with a diverse product offering that covers every niche in their trade. They are the largest leading commercial, residential pool, and spa equipment manufacturer with an expansive global footprint covering over 45 countries.

Fluidra’s existing IT support model was underutilized, in need of dedicated resources, and lacked expertise in optimizing efficiency. Leveraging our team’s expertise, we developed a SRE Support model that not only addressed these shortcomings but also ensured the stability, performance, and scalability Fluidra required.

Problem

The client expressed dissatisfaction with their existing support model and was actively exploring alternative approaches to enhance its efficiency. Their IT platform suffered from underutilization, difficulty of maintaining dedicated resources, and finding expertise in SRE Support; Fluidra needed a strategy to meet these challenges.

Goals

To create a SRE Support model that is:

Reliable

Scalable

Cost Effective

Solution

Our team developed a SRE Support model combing software engineering best practices with operations expertise to enhance the reliability, efficiency, and resilience of their platform. This model employs proactive strategies, automation, and continuous improvement to maximize system efficiency and provide outstanding services to Fluidra’s customers.

Proactive Approach: Proactively detects and addresses potential issues to ensure the seamless operation of the Fluidra IOT Platform

Collaborative Development Operations: The team collaborates with development, DevOps, support, and security, maintaining continuous feedback loops

Automation and Self-Healing: Streamlines operations through automation, reducing manual effort and enhancing response times

Continuous Improvement: Encourages continuous improvement through incident analysis, user feedback, and data-driven optimization of platform performance

Metrics-Driven Approach: Uses Service Level Indicators (SLIs) to monitor and improve the platform’s health, reliability, and performance, ensuring adherence to service level agreements

Outcome

We were able to enhance platform observability, streamline incident management, automate routine tasks, and empower the support team. These efforts resulted in improved system reliability, faster incident resolution, and overall operational efficiency for the Fluidra IOT Platform. Furthermore, we were able to:

Achievements

Automate 50% of manual tasks

Established KPIs and Roadmap for the SRE Team

Increased efficiency to 1.5x while maintaining similar support SLAs

Blended traditional support resources with SRE comprising of Software, Cloud, and Support Engineers

(By August 2024) The Pod will handle 2 additional apps, reducing support costs by at least 2x

Developed framework and tooling for the SRE Team that can be used to build automated runbooks

Continued Success

At IntraEdge, we have continued to work and support Fluidra in other aspects of their company. Highlighted below are additional noteworthy projects that have achieved remarkable success.

Offshore Support Case Study

Problem: Fluidra did not have a strong offshore presence.

Solution: Our team presented a Build, Operate, and Transfer offering with a Digital Center of Excellence (DCE) in Pune, India.

Outcome: The Digital Center of Excellence had about 125 resources, and helped to consolidate some offshore vendors and expand several teams to this new DCE. This also helped Fluidra to significantly save on their existing vendors and onshore FTEs.

Data Lake Case Study

Problem: Fluidra’s current sureTREAT water application did not have the capabilities to scale their analytics as additional users were added to the platform.

Solution: Our team designed and built a cloud-native serverless architecture and glued data pipelines to ingest and transform the data within data lake.

Outcome: New application helped to support 100,000 plus users while keeping the hosting budget at 50% of the planned amount.