Red Hat SummitSuccess Story
German government accelerates digital service development with Capgemini and Red Hat
Overview
Capgemini is a global business and technology transformation partner, helping organizations to accelerate their dual transition to a digital and sustainable world, while creating tangible impact for enterprises and society. Capgemini is trusted by its clients to unlock the value of technology to address the entire breadth of their business needs.
Capgemini’s customer, The Federal Information Technology Center (ITZBund) is the central information technology service provider for the German federal government. Its mission is to shape and advance the administration’s digitization, acting as a single source of management for IT planning, development, and operations.
ITZBund wanted to enable software developers to work in a more agile method with current tools. Using Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces, Capgemini helped ITZBund accelerate key processes while adhering to stringent security requirements in an air-gapped environment, one that is isolated from the internet.
- INDUSTRY
IT Services and Consulting - REGION
Worldwide - HEADQUARTERS
Paris, France - SIZE
> 360.000 employees
Challenge
Digitizing key government services
As the German government looks to modernize operations and enable citizens and businesses to access services digitally, demands on its technology infrastructure are growing constantly.
ITZBund is a key player in the transition towards an electronic government (e-government) environment. This involves the use of electronic technologies to provide government services to citizens, businesses, and other government agencies.
“Digitization and automated administration are major challenges, and there is a high demand for software developers’ workstations to take on these challenges,” said Jörg Heinke, Enterprise Architect at Capgemini Cloud Infrastructure Services. Developers require computing resources, plug-ins, tools, and platforms on which to develop, test and deploy applications. However, it was a major challenge to quickly provide these resources while considering high-security requirements.
Developers usually have immediate access to laptops, which means limited processing power and no GPU acceleration. Gaining the necessary software, tools, plug-ins, and permissions is a complex onboarding process. Being able to provide this process with all software components in a centralized manner, considering a variety of security aspects, is a significant boost towards agility.
Scaling all these processes to boost software development results in higher quality and quantity of software solutions for government services.
Solution
A flexible and agile development platform
The main objective was to create an architecture that would meet the security and privacy requirements for government agencies, as well as the requirements of a modern agile development platform with an up-to-date toolset. To achieve this, Capgemini, as part of the ITZBund platform team, further developed the standardized platform product for public services to meet these requirements.
The solution needed to be integrated into the automated deployment process for container platforms like Red Hat® OpenShift® and required NVIDIA graphics cards for AI and ML business cases.
Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces Operator in combination with NVIDIA vGPU Operator was an obvious solution.
To fulfill the strict security requirements, the solution was implemented by automated deployment in a “air-gapped” environment, i.e. without a connection to the Internet. For this purpose, all resources are kept local and scanned for vulnerabilities. This significantly minimized the risk of exploitation.
The solution included centrally managed workspaces for developers, providing sufficient computing power to develop AI applications. NVIDIA GPU Operator was used to provide graphics cards to the Red Hat OpenShift cluster. Operators can then automate the management and configuration of all NVIDIA software components required for GPU provisioning. It is possible to configure vGPU resources for different developer groups dynamically.
Software & Services used by Capgemini
Red Hat Single Sign-On Technology (SSO)
Business outcome
Delivering significant citizen benefits
Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces has significantly reduced the time required to onboard software developers and increase their productivity.
- Workspaces can be deployed and scaled quickly with all the necessary resources, tools, and permissions.
- Lead times for software releases can be significantly reduced.
- Collaboration between software developers has reached a new level.
- Accelerated development speeds mean more releases can be done in the same timeframe with agile methods and agile toolsets.
The development, build, testing, and deployment processes now all take place on a single platform—Red Hat OpenShift—leading to more consistent process quality. Developer satisfaction is also improved, enhancing ITZBund’s reputation as an employer. Centralized management achieves all this while reducing costs.
“Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces allowed us to centrally manage permissions, security policies, and resources in one place” said Alexander Hiesinger, Enterprise Architect at Capgemini Cloud Infrastructure Services. “We were also able to respond quickly to changes and provide developers with the appropriate workstations.”
The implementation has now enlarged ITZBund’s technical capabilities, enabling the transfer of new business perspectives, knowledge, and expertise to be passed on to other projects. Government authorities can order container platforms, which also offer the option of being used as an integrated development platform with a centrally managed toolset, with flexible allocation of vGPU resources.
But more importantly, it will significantly boost the development of new AI tools and SaaS offerings, accelerating the digitization of public administration in Germany and bringing significant benefits to citizens.
Related resources
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