LefeWare Solutions worked directly with the SafeFoods engineers to understand and break down the existing MARC legacy monolith into a series of microservices as part of their replatforming initiative. This strategic decision allowed for a more modular and scalable architecture, enabling greater flexibility and ease of maintenance. By leveraging Azure cloud services, LefeWare Solutions ensured a seamless transition that emphasized on improving security and cost-effectiveness throughout the process.

An Azure App Service Environment was used to securely host many of the applications with the private network, while Azure Functions enabled efficient and scalable operations. CosmosDB played a vital role in partitioning customer data for on-demand scalability and cross-region availability. The team implemented Azure KeyVault to securely store sensitive passwords, connection strings, and encryption keys, adding an extra layer of protection to the system. Azure B2C facilitated user authentication, management, and integration with third-party identity providers, ensuring a streamlined and secure user experience. Azure Application Gateway and Azure Firewall were utilized to filter and secure incoming traffic, bolstering the system’s security posture.

With meticulous planning and skillful execution, LefeWare Solutions successfully achieved the replatforming of the MARC system ahead of schedule, significantly enhancing its functionality, scalability, and overall performance. Through their expertise and attention to detail, LefeWare Solutions demonstrated their commitment to delivering a successful replatforming endeavor that positively impacted the MARC system.

LefeWare Solutions brought a variety of innovative approaches to SafeFoods, including DevOps, GitOps, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC)  to streamline the rebuild and migration procedures. These methodologies not only enhanced the software development process but also ensured that the entire system’s transformation was seamless and efficient.

The team at LefeWare developed a series of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines using Azure DevOps. These pipelines automated the process of software development, enabling the team to validate integrations, build, and deploy software and infrastructure across numerous environments systematically. By adopting Azure DevOps, they could automate and accelerate the process from development to production, reducing the risk of errors and facilitating consistent and reliable deployments. The use of GitOps further provided a standard methodology for managing and versioning the infrastructure, ensuring that every change is traceable and reversible.

The implementation of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) through Bicep significantly improved the management and provisioning of resources. By defining and managing infrastructure in a code-based format, it helped create a uniform and repeatable environment, thereby reducing potential inconsistencies and improving overall operational efficiency.

Through these strategies, LefeWare Solutions has significantly enhanced the development, testing, and deployment processes at SafeFoods, ensuring a more organized, automated, and efficient system transformation

LefeWare Solutions understood the criticality of the security concerns raised in the failed third-party assessment of SafeFoods’ MARC platform. Recognizing the urgent need for remediation, the team implemented several measures to strengthen the security posture of the platform during the migration and modernization process.

An Azure App Service Environment was used to securely host many of the applications within the private network. This added an extra layer of protection to the system, safeguarding it from potential threats. Azure KeyVault was implemented to securely store sensitive passwords, connection strings, and encryption keys.Azure B2C was utilized for user authentication, management, and integration with third-party identity providers, ensuring a streamlined and secure user experience. To bolster the system’s security posture, Azure Application Gateway and Azure Firewall were used to filter and secure incoming traffic.

As part of the modernization process, LefeWare Solutions also significantly improved SafeFood’s data collection methods, advanced their reporting procedures, and enhanced real-time dashboard visualizations as part of the project. The process of data collection involved collating information from multiple embedded systems, located in plants across North America. This was successfully achieved by leveraging Azure IoT Hub, a cloud service offered by Microsoft that provides bi-directional communication to IoT devices, making the collection process robust and scalable.

The collected data was subsequently directed into the company’s Azure Data Lake. Azure Data Lake, a highly scalable and secure data storage and analytics service, served as the company’s centralized data repository. Here, vast amounts of data from diverse sources were stored, making it readily available for various analytical tasks.

As part of SafeFood’s Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) process, we performed a series of data transformations on the stored data in the Azure Data Lake. These transformations were crucial to cleanse, reshape, and align the data, thus improving its overall quality and usefulness. This methodical data transformation step facilitated efficient data analysis and ensured the accuracy of the subsequent reports and real-time dashboards.

With these optimizations, SafeFood’s ability to monitor their operations was greatly enhanced, providing immediate access to vital data points and business metrics. This also allowed for proactive decision-making based on real-time insights. LefeWare Solutions is proud to have empowered SafeFood with a more reliable and sophisticated data handling and reporting system.