VR Group-Finnish Railways is responsible for 118 million passenger rides and moving 41 million tons of cargo a year and is seeing overall growth in rail transit throughout Finland. A priority for the organization is to provide improved customer services, including an improved seat reservation system and bringing modern experiences like next generation mobile apps to their passengers. These improvements require looking at their application portfolio and deciding to either: Revise: Transform legacy applications to more cost efficient solutions Redesign: Redesign and rewrite mainframe-based solutions to microservices In this session, Markus Niskanen, Integration Manager at VR Group, and Oscar Renalias, Sr. Technology Architect at Accenture will discuss how they leveraged Docker EE and the public cloud to be the common platform for these different application modernization projects. They will cover how they are leveraging Docker and the cloud to renew and optimize their application portfolio for greater ROI, leading to organization-wide adaptation of DevOps principles and cultural change in an industry that is over 150 years old.

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How Docker is Finnish Railway’s Ticket to
App Modernization
Markus Niskanen
Oscar Renalias
18.10.2017

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Net sales
1 186.7
million euros
82.1
million
train journeys
35.8
million
bus
journeys
36.1
Million
tons of goods
transported by
rail
5.1
Million
tons of goods
transported by
road
7 898
workers
Train Operations Maintenance

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• 300+ different applications
• 100s of integrations
• 10s of different vendors
• 6 different local datacenters
• 90%+ of development outsourced to partners
Managing Diversity – By The Numbers

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BUSINESS DRIVERS
• Bang for the buck
• Quality
• Time to market
IT DRIVERS
• Common application platform
• Unified architecture
• Open Source based solutions
• Microservices
• DevOps approach
Drivers For Change – Why Did We Start The Modernization

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Migration
Business Case
DevOps
Platform
Analysing
Architechture
Options
IaC
Implementation
Commuter
Services
Go-Live
Migrations
Starts
Implementing
Docker
Platform
Migrating Pilot
Applications
Reservation
System
Go-Live
Pilot Apps
Go Live
AWS
Architecture
2015 2017 20182016
What Has Been Done - Timeline

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As VR’s next-gen application platform, this was a great
opportunity to provide teams with a modern, state of the art
experience
[pvm] [Aihe, Tekijä]6
Consistent
Provide a runtime,
development and operation
experience with zero
surprises
Unified
Common underlying
components, regardless
of technology or
framework
Automated
Enable as much as possible
with zero human
intervention

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Docker EE Additional components
DOCKER ENTERPRISE EDITION
Infrastructure
Runtime
Services
Administration
Host OS Container OS
Container Engine Container Tooling
Orchestration Resource
Management
Service Discovery
PersistenceNetworking
Browser Application
Integrations
Containers
Data
Registry
Storage (Images)
Monitoring
DevOps
Logging
Image Build
Access Control
Log aggregation
Metrics aggregation
Monitoring,
alerting
Secrets
Management
Stacks Swarm Overlays
Sysdig Docker Overlays Convoy DTR
S3
Docker Docker CLI
RHEL RHEL
Jenkins
Docker EE
ELK
Sysdig
Sysdig
Docker EE
Storage
(Volumes)EFS

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Docker EE allows Finnish Rail to run mixed workloads on a
common, consistent platform
DOCKER ENTERPRISE EDITION
Legacy WorkloadsMicroservices & APIsNon-production

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Docker EE runs
great on AWS

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Development
Laying out Docker EE on multiple standalone environments while
still achieving the efficiencies of containers required some thinking
Production A
Production B
Test
Promote Promote
Promote
Failover if
necessary

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Docker EE provides robust multi-tenancy capabilities for a multi-
tenant application platform
• One org per project with at least one technical user for
deployment, integrated with Active Directory; no cross team
resource access
• Separate HRM routes per project
• Teams manage their own resources: stacks, services, networks,
bundles using standardized naming conventions
• Engine labels to separate worker nodes per business group – soon
to be replaced with Node RBAC
• Secrets management to simplify configuration management

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Docker Trusted Registry greatly simplifies the process of managing
a large number of images
• One DTR organization per team, with multiple repositories as
needed
• Each team is responsible for managing their own repositories
• Immutable repositories to prevent overwriting labels
• Image scanning and signing is in the roadmap, has not been
enabled yet

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Enabling development
Manual/user guide: naming conventions (stacks, HRM, images,
networks), secrets, load balancing
Common base images: CentOS, JDK, JBoss
Reference patterns and cookbook: load balancing, reverse proxy,
application configuration, multiple application versions, file shares, and
others
Reference applications and pipelines

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BUILD TEST PUBLISH
DEPLOY
(non-prod)
DEPLOY
(prod)
Promote
DTR
(non-prod)
Non-
prod
Clusters
Prod
cluster
Build Nodes
Enabling a consistently, automated and unified deployment
experience with containers
DTR
(prod)

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Achieving operational visibility across the platform with containers
and container-native processes
DOCKER ENTERPRISE EDITION
Logging Monitoring Metrics
Resource
Management

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What Did We Achieve

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• Trust that you are on the right track
– Technology works
• This is not just a technology change
– the whole organization is affected
• Containers are largely developer
driven
• Docker is evolving really fast –
make sure your organization and
infastructure can deal with it
Lessons learned