We recently passed an important milestone, onboarding our 20th team on Kartverket's platform. Since we started a few years ago we've been working hard to build a platform that drives positive change at Kartverket, and we're proud of the results we've got. Our research shows that users are happy with the technology and support they get, and that they're able to deliver faster and more securely than before.

Building a platform is not easy, and it requires re-thinking a lot of assumptions held in your organization. It's therefore easy to lose your way and to end up with something that doesn't deliver on the high standards you've set for your organization. Like everyone that starts with something new we've made mistakes along the way, we've had to change course multiple times and most importantly we've learned a lot in our journey.

On the occasion of this achievement we're going to look back at the decisions we made that led us to building a successful platform. In this tech blog we are showcasing the secrets to our success - the decisions that have had the biggest impact.

Argo CD is an awesome tool. It helps teams de-mystify the deployment process on Kubernetes by providing a visual representation of the deployments in the cluster, and GitOps methodologies gives a consistent and understandable structure to your configuration files.

But what's the best way to scale when adding more teams? How can we make sure that we're building our GitOps in a way that facilitates for self service and security? That's what we'll discuss in this blog post.

Kartverket has been using Argo CD and GitOps for several years, and we've built an architecture that solves our needs for scale and self-service. Here we'll share our learnings and discuss why our teams are so happy with our Argo setup.

Every IT organization with some semblance of sanity has at least one crisis management or disaster recovery plan, and probably several, depending on the scope and severity of the scenario. Ranging from "one of our more important applications is experiencing issues in production" through "everything is on fire" on to total loss of data, a good crisis management or disaster recovery plan should help you retain business continuity or at the very least ensure a return to normal operations within the shortest possible timeframe. But when was the last time you actually found the time to test your plans and ability to respond to a crisis?

In this final installment of the Anthos series, we will talk about what we learned on the way to building hybrid infrastructure at Kartverket.

It's been a long journey, and there's plenty of things we've learned along the way in building a hybrid Kubernetes platform. We'll try to share some of those hard earned lessons in this post.

Very recently, SKIP was featured on the Plattformpodden podcast! Vegar and Eline were invited to talk about SKIP, how it came to be and what it's like to work on it.

Give it a listen!

https://plattformpodden.no/episode/6

In this second installment of the Anthos series, we will talk about how we run Anthos and hybrid cloud at Kartverket. We'll touch on the hardware, the software, and the processes we use to keep it running.

By the end we hope that we'll have de-mystified Anthos a bit, and maybe given you an idea of what it takes to run Anthos in production.

If you haven't read the first part, you can find it here.

Over the years we talked with many other public sector companies about their experiences in running containers in production. One of the biggest challenges that we hear again and again is the challenge of running hybridized workloads, or how to have some workloads running on-premise and some in the the cloud in a good way.

In this newsletter-series we will share some of our experiences solving this issue by running Anthos on VMWare (or GKE on-prem, if you prefer) tied together to the cloud in Kartverket using hybrid mesh. We will also discuss the reasons we went with Anthos and pros and cons we have experienced so far.

SKIP is starting a tech blog! 🚀

Or call it a newsletter if you're tired of blogs 🤪

Our first entry is already out, and it's about why we chose Anthos for hybrid cloud. We're working on more entries into that series and other exciting topics, so stay tuned!