Jotun modernizes key business apps to run on Azure

A cloud journey from on-premises to IaaS to PaaS

The Jotun Group is a leading global supplier of decorative paints and marine, protective, and powder coatings, which are used to protect everything from appliances, auto parts, and bridges to ports and harbors, power plants, and ships. Based in Norway, Jotun has 38 production facilities in 23 countries and is represented in more than 100 countries around the world.

In the past, Jotun ran all of its key business apps on-premises in its own datacenter. That began to change in 2016 after a successful migration from IBM Notes to Microsoft Office 365, which marked the company’s first move to the public cloud. By 2018, having seen all the benefits the cloud can offer, the company had developed a strong cloud-first mindset and began migrating its key business apps to the cloud.

Having been a Microsoft shop for many years, those business apps ran on Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, BizTalk Server, SharePoint, and other Microsoft server software—with UIs based on Microsoft .NET Framework technologies like Web Forms and Windows Forms. Initial migration efforts were largely “lift and shift” to an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environment in which the company simply moved apps that were running on virtual machines in its own datacenter to virtual machines hosted on Azure.

While those early migrations enabled the company to stop worrying about its own hardware, most of the other distractions of managing its own datacenter remained, including backups, patching, and scheduled downtime for software upgrades. “We were maintaining four identical environments for each key app: one for development, one for test, one for QA, and one for production,” says Bjorn Anton Wegger, Project Portfolio and Governance Manager at Jotun. “The time and effort we spent on routine system management and administration was extensive.”

Knowing it was on a journey to a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) environment in which Jotun would no longer need to worry about day-to-day system administration, the company didn’t want to invest any more in an IaaS environment than needed. So, Jotun began to shift its focus to a “lift-and-modernize” approach in which the company would begin modernizing its remaining on-premises apps to run in fully managed PaaS services on Azure.

“Avoiding routine system administration tasks wasn’t our only motivation for app modernization on Azure,” says Wegger. “We saw it as a path to convert monolithic apps into scalable and distributed ones as needed to help us address performance issues that customers were seeing in some parts of the world. We also saw how app modernization would help us transition from traditional waterfall development to a modern DevSecOps approach with all the inherent advantages, including lower costs and faster time to market for new features and capabilities.”

Jotun selected nine apps for its initial lift-and-modernize project. All were older, monolithic apps that ran on-premises, with most being customer-facing or otherwise sales-oriented. “We decided to start with our most important sales support applications first—specifically, those where modernization would deliver the greatest customer benefits,” says Wegger. “Within those nine apps, we prioritized two groups by their potential for performance improvements, license expiration for on-premises software, and projected cost savings. We had very high confidence in Infosys, our development partner for the last eight years, so we weren’t overly concerned about going big from the start.”

Modernizing nine apps in 11 months

The company’s lift-and-modernize project began in October 2020. To help ensure its success, Jotun enlisted in Microsoft’s Azure Migration and Modernization Program, under which Infosys, an Azure Expert Managed Service Provider, is certified as an Advanced Specialization Partner in Modernization of Web Applications. Program resources provided as part of the Azure Migration and Modernization Program include technical training, best practices, and step-by-step guidance and support from engineers at Microsoft.

“We wanted to get things right from the start,” says Wegger. “The Azure Migration and Modernization Program helped us answer key questions such as, ‘Where in Azure should we land these apps? Which services should we use? And how will we handle governance?’ The resources that Microsoft provided in helping us answer such questions was invaluable.”

Dedicated project resources included about a dozen Infosys developers, a program manager, a project lead, and an architect. Jotun resources included two architects and various business owners and solution owners for the apps, with Wegger in the role of project sponsor. All development was done using Visual Studio Code with GitHub repos for source code control. The team used Azure DevOps pipelines for builds and code deployment, which was integrated with an automated regression test suite based on Selenium.

The first step was a three-way alignment discussion led by Infosys, which was intended to ensure successful collaboration between Infosys technical and project leads, Jotun technical and project leads, and the Azure engineering program manager who was assigned to the project. Following that, the team spent two months establishing an Azure landing zone. Completed in December 2020, the landing zone gave Jotun an Azure environment that’s ready to support application modernization and migration at enterprise scale, including the Azure resources needed for scalability, security, governance, identity, networking, and management—all capable of being provisioned with code.

Software development began in January 2021, and the first five apps were migrated in April 2021, with the remaining four apps being completed in September 2021. Figure 1 illustrates the new architecture for those apps on Azure.

For each app, developers modified its .NET Framework code to run on Azure App Service, a fully managed service for building, deploying, and scaling web apps and APIs—including built-in infrastructure maintenance, security, and patching. When required for some apps, the work included upgrades to newer versions of the .NET Framework.

“The apps we started with were monolithic, so they didn’t scale well,” says Alex Wilhelmsen, Digital Architect at Jotun. “Azure App Service let us break down those apps into components that could be scaled out separately. We didn’t have to rearchitect the apps completely, and most of our code rework was in this area. Fortunately, we were able to scope out the work fairly accurately and hit our deadlines—even completing some of our milestones ahead of schedule.”

In implementing App Service, the team took advantage of deployment slots to minimize downtime during code updates. Deployment slots run alongside default production slots as live apps with their own host names, enabling Jotun to spin up and validate changes to its apps before swapping it with the production slot. Traffic redirection is seamless, no requests are dropped when slots are swapped, and Jotun can immediately roll back to the previous production slot should an issue arise.

For the data tier of each app, developers modified SQL Server code to run on Azure SQL Database, taking advantage of the Azure Database Migration Service to simplify, guide, and automate that work. “Some companies choose Azure SQL Managed Instance over SQL Database for similar migrations because it’s closer to what they know,” says Surjit Kalarikkal, Program Manager at Infosys. “Our analysis showed we would be compatible with SQL Database, and the additional PaaS capabilities it provides over SQL Managed Instance made it the preferred option.”

Jotun did, however, use SQL Managed Instance together with Azure Data Factory for integration with on-premises apps. The company moved its SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) environments into an Azure virtual machine running SQL Server and moved file stores to Azure Blob Storage. Finally, for the data tier, Jotun employed active geo-replication in SQL Database to support distributed deployment across multiple Azure datacenters as needed to help ensure strong performance across all the geographies in which Jotun customers reside.

Other key Azure services that support the nine apps include:

• Azure Front Door, an application delivery service and web application firewall, which Jotun uses to route users to the closest Azure datacenter hosting the apps.
• Azure Traffic Manager, which operates at the DNS layer to quickly and efficiently direct incoming traffic requests.
• Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), which provides customers with single sign-on across all nine apps. Previously, customers had to maintain separate credentials for some of the apps.
• Azure Cache for Redis, which provides an in-memory data store for web and application session state.
• Azure Key Vault, which helps safeguard cryptographic keys and other secrets that the apps use.
• Azure DevOps, which is used for continuous integration and continuous delivery, including deployment to the company’s various test, QA, and production environments.
• Azure Monitor, which Jotun uses to collect, analyze, and act on telemetry from each app.
• Azure Security Center, which enables Jotun to assess and visualize the security state of its Azure environment.

The results

Today, all nine apps are running in production on Azure, as are their associated development, test, and QA environments. They run on some 61 App Service instances and 35 Azure SQL instances, supporting more than 10,000 customers around the globe across almost all of Jotun’s business lines and geographic presences.

The rollout was done without business interruption, and feedback to date has been largely positive. “To customers, the apps generally look and feel the same,” says Wegger. “People tell us that the apps are more stable and perform better, especially in some geographies, which is exactly what we set out to deliver from a customer-facing perspective.

Thanks to the team’s use of App Service deployment slots, customers also aren’t being inconvenienced with as much downtime. “In the past, we had hours of downtime for each new deployment,” says Jan Erik Aarethun, Enterprise Architect at Jotun. “Today, the downtime required for a software upgrade is only 5 to 10 minutes. We haven’t experienced any unplanned downtime at all.”

While customers are indeed better off today, as Wegger sees it, the real benefit to them will come through faster time to market for new features and applications. “In the past, under our waterfall process, we had one team writing requirements, developers coding to those requirements, and then throwing that new software across the wall for business owners to test,” he explains. “Today, we have everyone working together in a unified effort on a single product team. Our transition to an integrated DevSecOps process on Azure has helped us move two to three major releases per year to rapid three-week sprints.”

The company’s new delivery pipeline based on Azure DevOps has also enabled more automated and thorough testing. What’s more, Jotun’s incorporation of Monitor and Security Center into its Azure infrastructure has delivered two new capabilities that were largely absent in the past: deep, end-to-end visibility into application performance and security.

Finally, Jotun now has much better visibility into the cost allocation for each app, enabling it to pinpoint cost elements and then apply Azure tools to further optimize total costs. “In the past, the answer to most every problem was to scale up some more,” says Wegger. “Today, we can quickly and efficiently scale up and down as needed with Azure. For example, we can use Azure Resource Manager templates to turn off our QA and test environments between releases and then turn them back on again when needed.”

Looking back at all that his team accomplished over the past year, Wegger is pleased with the results. “We achieved a lot in the last 12 months,” he says. “And thanks to the expertise of Infosys and the assistance we received from the Azure Migration and Modernization Program, we got it all done faster, with lower costs and increased confidence. We’re already working on a few new projects and will continue to modernize more apps under our ongoing cloud-first strategy. We’re not fully where we want to be yet, but we’ve made a good start, and it’s getting better every day.”

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