Pelotech × UKi
About the Company
UKi is a technology company dedicated to providing innovative digital education solutions. With 25 years of experience, UKi has delivered tailored cyber training programs to both the commercial sector and government agencies, including Fortune 500 companies and various federal departments.
UKi was founded by Tony Akers and Dr Scott Wells, who back in the early 2000s, realized that there was a gap in training opportunities for deployed service members. They came up with a way to provide training with a more personal approach, first in person and later online. Six years ago they built OpenDash360, a collection of workforce tools for managing cyber readiness, to help service members earn certificates and competencies. OpenDash360 also enabled a top down view of the workforces training, which enabled the Department of Defense to start making decisions on unit readiness based on clear data and analytics. OpenDash360 has made it possible for service members to get access to training from top experts regardless of their location.
The motto for UKi is to do right by the service members first, take care of the employees second, after which revenue growth will follow. This transformation has enabled UKi to grow from a small congregation of folks who traveled all over the world into a team working with top industry experts, delivering enterprise-grade software that customers are eager to access.
The Initial Challenges
The UKi development team recognized that they had a talent gap in regards to cloud expertise, while wanting to move their offering into a cloud environment. Their first thought was to hire one or two cloud experts to join their team. Since the UKi team are not cloud experts themselves, they found it difficult to interview people and were also realizing that hiring someone to join the team would mean trusting one individual with a big responsibility. This led UKi to shift their approach to rather find a service company that could provide them the competences in question. The qualifications were to find a US based team, with an AWS endorsement, that could integrate with the UKi team quickly without causing a lot of disruption or in need of onboarding.
The Initial Solutions
Liam Dorney, UKi's chief operating officer, ended up screening through 40 different potential service companies that could help UKi with their cloud migration challenges. He wanted UKi to cooperate with a company with trustworthy previous customer references and proven experience with cloud related projects. Pelotech ended up ticking the boxes in regards to what Liam was looking for, which led to Pelotech helping UKi move into GovCloud. This has later staged UKi for a platter of opportunities that they would not have otherwise had.
“Pelotech are experts in their field. They are plugged in to modern approaches, while not being tied to a specific technology to solve a problem. They look at the challenge and consider a wider landscape of what can be applied, while asking the question “what are we actually trying to achieve?”. They’ve proposed sound approaches to our challenges and have been able to navigate the, at times, strong opinions that arise when smart people from different teams are working together.”
Dr. Scott Wells
Co-Founder at UKi
How the Challenge Developed
A couple months into the cooperation the teams discovered that there was a critical dependency to a virtualization platform provider that lost UKi months of productivity. The virtualization platform provider was prototyping their solution alongside UKi, while the UKi team was building their training courses and ranges using the tool in question. The dependency resulted in hundreds of work stoppages, which naturally was detrimental for further developments for the UKi team.
Another issue that UKi was facing was that they had only one environment in which they did all their development demos. The environment was built in a manual fashion that was not reproducible and could be difficult to recover from in case it failed. Due to UKi's active development work it was not sustainable to let customers use this specific environment and hence there was a strong need to increase the amount of environments.
How the Solutions Developed
The seamless cooperation between UKi and Pelotech resulted in them being able to build their own virtualization platform that met the technical requirements while leaving room for adaptability. It also drastically saved on compute costs by leveraging autoscaling and modern virtualization technologies. Together they had a working proof of concept in 2.5 months and were able to make a minimum viable product in just 6 months. Eliminating this third party dependency meant a lot more possibilities in terms of building and testing new features and an increased efficiency while doing so.
”I initially thought we were 3 years out of being able to build this ourselves because of the complexity of what Pelotech took on. I was amazed when I realized how quickly things were moving along.”
Dr. Scott Wells
Co-Founder at UKi
Pelotech also helped UKi build out multiple environments to make sure that new features can be tested and developed while the product is being used by customers. Liam Dorney pointed out that the cooperation has enabled them to look deeper inside their own software development methodologies to create an environment where things can be built in a more sustainable way.
Pelotech is currently leading the effort to make UKi a FedRamp certified government contractor, meaning that federal agencies can freely use UKi's cloud services because they meet stringent security standards to protect sensitive data. This will evolve UKi into a best-in-class organization in regards to software development and cybersecurity practices.
Technical Deep Dive
UKi’s digital courses involve creating virtual computer networks consisting of VMs that provide learners with a way to conduct realistic cybersecurity scenarios in a simulated environment. These training environments are made possible by a virtualization platform, which at first was provided to UKi by a 3rd party. This 3rd party virtualization platform was expensive to run and was built with hand-written custom components which made the system difficult to maintain and evolve. Given these challenges it was clear UKi needed to take ownership of their own virtualization platform, which Pelotech prototyped and successfully launched.
Pelotech used powerful open source tools to build the new virtualization platform, making it more scalable and maintainable. The platform is an cluster with custom operators that solve UKi’s specific needs. In order to run virtual machine instances in Kubernetes, Pelotech leveraged the KubeVirt project, using auto-scaling metal nodes to run the VMs on-demand and cost efficiently. The training environments also require the ability to define multiple different networks to mimic the topology of a real-world enterprise network. To solve this need, Pelotech utilized a combination of Kube-OVN for software defined networks within the cluster, and Multus to add the ability for pods and VMs to have more than one network interface. On the product side, Pelotech built a React frontend that communicates with the VMs using the Guacamole project to enable VM access from a web browser with near-native responsiveness. The backend API provisions these virtual environments in Kubernetes using Helm.
The value of these open source tools cannot be understated – they enable Pelotech and UKi to build a fully functional solution quickly, whereas a custom solution from scratch would have taken months to years.
“You have to take a step back and understand what Pelotech has managed to build. They have set up a network where we can define what a specific cyber security training should look like. The software then builds this virtual network for us. The students can go in and do their exercises, after which the software destroys the network and we don’t have to pay Amazon for it anymore. Pulling this off in such a short time frame is crazy.”
Dr. Scott Wells
Co-Founder at UKi
The Results
- With Pelotech guiding our implementation of Kubernetes in AWS for both Commercial and Federal products, UKi achieved its target goals 2-3 times faster and with a 50% reduction in manual work. This streamlined approach resulted in overall cycle time reduction of 50%, while also enabling a 76% recovery of existing technical debt.
- Through Pelotech's AWS architecture optimization, UKi has achieved a 3x increase in Availability, and eliminated our prior dependance on maintenance and down-time periods in our development environments.
- Pelotech's innovation and bespoke development eliminated 100% UKIs third party dependencies, saving the company $500k annually.
- UKi is now able to deliver enterprise-grade software, with a 97% reduction in OD360 deployment time.
- Pelotech's AWS GovCloud expertise has successfully positioned UKi to become a FedRamp-certified SaaS solution.
- Their cooperation with UKi's team has evolved the organization to adopt a DevOps approach focused on automation, optimization, and quality delivery of UKi SaaS products.
“The Pelotech team needs to be highlighted - they are absolute experts in their field, and I see us working together on a long term basis.”
Liam Dorney
Chief Operating Officer at UKi