Containerizing Hansken: first steps in modern deployment
A great milestone: Hansken takes its first steps in containers! After a number of months of preparations, Hansken is now running demo and practice environments on Kubernetes. This Hansken version has now also been made available to partner organizations, so they can experience how Hansken works in containers. One important step on the future-proof path, making it even easier to make Digital Forensic as a Service available.
Why is this development relevant?
A brand-new infrastructure based on container technology makes Hansken even better and readier for the future. New code is transferred from a developer's machine to the production environment more quickly, for example. With an increasing number of international organizations using Hansken, a great deal of attention is being devoted to continuous improvement of the platform and its user friendliness. And containerization is an important step in the process of simplifying the management of the platform.
Containerization: what does this entail for Hansken?
Container technology is becoming an important platform standard. A container works as an autonomous application component with all the parts the application needs to function. This provides numerous benefits, but it also takes quite some effort, while all platform components must be prepared to run in a cloud-native environment.
Following this first rollout for Hansken in containers, more releases will follow until we achieve a fully production-ready version. Further steps in Hansken's containerization include making Hansken components scalable, so that, for example, you are running not one, but twenty components of a specific type (as is already the case now in the existing production version). Finally, performance tuning, security and debugging follow, after which Hansken will start running on the new infrastructure in production.
What are the advantages?
In concrete terms, we will notice the following improvements:
- Modern and scalable infrastructure makes Hansken more suitable for offering to both law enforcement agencies and universities (using the Hansken Academic version).
- Exactly the same containers are used in all environments (i.e. development and production environments of the partners), which increases the quality.
- The installation and upgrade process is easier, which simplifies the roll-out to both current and new partners.
- Hansken's flexible infrastructure makes it easier to maintain.
- Hansken’s capacity can be easily scaled up or down.
- Release and deployment can be further automated, so that new versions of Hansken can be delivered more rapidly, with less downtime and higher quality.
- Reduced management burden.
- Less need for on-site support, as processes are less susceptible to errors.
- Increased and constant quality.
- More test environments, ensuring increased speed and quality when delivering features and fixes.