OGE Energy Corp. was founded in 1902 and is headquartered in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. OGE Energy Corp., together with its subsidiaries, operates as an energy and energy services provider that offers physical delivery and related services in the United States. It operates through Electric Company Operations and Natural Gas Midstream segments. The company generates, transmits, distributes, and sells electric energy to almost 1 million customers in Oklahoma and western Arkansas. They also own and operates coal-fired, natural gas-fired, wind-powered, and solar-powered generating assets.
Business Challenge
OG&E has been using virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud to run their primary customer website platform, HCL Digital Experience. The complexity of the platform’s contents combined with the inability to scale to meet demand caused repeated performance issues and downtime.
After some research, the OG&E team realized that moving from VMs to containers, a system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, in Kubernetes could help them improve their resiliency and scalability during heavy traffic periods. They decided to launch a multiphase approach to migrate to Kubernetes and reached out to Asponte to perform the migration.
Our Approach
Phase 1
During the first phase, Asponte set up a Kubernetes cluster and migrated a subset of their HCL Digital Experience platform to its cloud-native version. Kubernetes features auto-scaling, self-healing, and rolling updates to improve the platform’s resiliency and reduce downtime. Since containers are more lightweight and faster to deploy than VMs, using containers and Kubernetes has helped them scale the platform autonomously based on its consumption as well as on demand.
Phase 2
After our success during phase one, OG&E decided to move their entire HCL Digital Experience platform to Kubernetes creating phase two of our project. We worked together through the migration and provided managed services for their platform to ensure a seamless transition for OG&E employees and their customers. Phase two only took a few months, and OG&E saw immediate improvements in their platform’s performance and resiliency during the next severe weather outbreak.
Software/Products Leveraged
- HCL Digital Experience
- Kubernetes
Results
Since moving to Kubernetes, OG&E has experienced significantly less downtime and better performance during heavy traffic periods such as ice storms and other severe weather events. OG&E is also able to deploy new features and updates more quickly and easily, which has helped their authors deliver information to their end users with new authoring features previously unavailable in traditional installations. The move to Kubernetes paired with Asponte’s managed services during the transition has proved to be a major success for OG&E, and they are now exploring other areas of their IT infrastructure where they can leverage containers and Kubernetes to improve resiliency and scalability.
