Now, just two A1 Austria engineers manage the large 30 node-cluster of 21TB storage as the telco moves systems to the cloud
A1 Austria, which is responsible for more than 50% of the €5.3bn revenue generated by parent A1 Group, has migrated its Elasticsearch clusters to the cloud as part of its underlying IT infrastructure transformation. The clusters used predominantly by the telco division at A1 Austria for advanced data analytics and run the largest and most business-critical workloads that were considered for migration.
When the cloud transition began, A1 Austria was running on-premises clusters of Elasticsearch and using Grafana dashboards to visualise the data and provide insights into the network. But the system was becoming increasingly complex, siloed and inefficient to manage. Perhaps more importantly, when Elasticsearch switched from a free, open-source model to a licensing model, A1 needed to head off any cost blowouts.
“Creating efficient dashboards that truly benefited the business could take weeks,” said A1 Austria core observability engineer Alexander Köstenbaumer. “Just because it’s a dashboard, it doesn’t mean it’s helpful – and we saw growing rates of exhaustion and confusion among our colleagues who were spending too much time trying to understand the information being presented to them.”
Move to OpenSearch
To do this, the telco used OpenSearch by Exoscale – the European cloud provider it acquired in 2017. At the time, A1 Group was leveraging Exoscale’s IT services, including compute, storage, Kubernetes and container solutions. The cloud provider was the obvious partner. All Exoscale’s database services are delivered exclusively by Helsinki-based AI platform company Aiven, including OpenSearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka and Grafana. A1 Austria opted for OpenSearch, a managed open-source Elasticsearch alternative.
The telco and Exoscale kicked off a proof-of-concept and in the end it took just one week to get everything up and running. A1 Austria now has a highly-scalable central observability infrastructure, based on a 30-node OpenSearch cluster with 21TB of storage – Exoscale’s largest deployment. It is growing at a rate of 10GB of data per day, or 300 GB of data each month, as data analysis and visualisation requirements of the A1 Austria telco team increase. Logstash is in place for data ingestion and Grafana dashboards remain for visualisation.
“We’ll need to add another cluster soon as we’re nearing capacity,” said Köstenbaumer. “To manage storage costs, we’ve adjusted our data retention policies and increased index rollover frequency. Fortunately, Exoscale cloud’s flexible nature allows us to add a small cluster and scale it as our data volume grows.”
Accelerating cloud adoption
OpenSearch has become an indispensable tool, with more than 100 technical users among the core network team relying on it daily to gain insights, and many more have access. “With OpenSearch, our data visualisation dashboards are running much faster. When we make a big data query, it’s at least double the speed,” said A1 VoLTE and VoWif acceptance expert Christoph Reiss. “It helps us identify network issues and fix them before they become major problems.”
The team has implemented custom alerts to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) from mobile voice and data core networks, including logins, active users, data usage and call failures. When a failure is detected, the responsible service team is immediately notified to investigate and resolve the issue. This dashboard, as well as others, are used by senior management to get an immediate view of how services are performing.
A1 Austria plans to move its instance of Grafana to Managed Grafana on Exoscale and is exploring Managed Apache Kafka on Exoscale, both powered by Aiven. “The triumph of the transition to OpenSearch has ignited a wave of cloud adoption across other parts of A1 Group,” said A1 Group IT services director, Momtchil Ivanov. He added that cloud adoption at A1 Group has since started to accelerate. It is migrating between 10 and 20 applications a month, and that rate is increasing.
