CASE STUDY

Q Engineering

Streamlining Data Analytics for Oil & Gas Forecasting

Q Engineering 1

Your Vision Achieved through Ours​

Q Engineering provides drilling and forecasting analytics for the exploration and production segments of the oil and gas industry. All of Q Engineering’s forecasting software and forecast-sharing is cloud-based.

Located in downtown Houston, Q Engineering is a software company founded by two visionaries who, after working in the industry for years, realized that there was a disconnect and a lack of efficiency between what went on in the field and what went on in boardrooms and business backends. They established Q Engineering to bridge that gap, bringing efficiencies and insights into field work and business practices.

Industry

Oil & Gas

Challenge

Building a Secure & Scalable Platform to Support Containerized Workloads

Services & Tech

Cloud Infrastructure, Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, AWS Lambda, Amazon RDS

Building a Secure & Scalable Platform to Support Containerized Workloads

Q Engineering wanted a secure and scalable platform to support their containerized workloads. Their unique application needed the ability to route traffic based on multiple endpoints to varying instance types handling specific workloads. Q Engineering also wanted to design an end-to-end CI/CD pipeline to allow for rapid development and feedback for the team.

Kubernetes Containers on AWS

Q Engineering first met Onica when they attended an Onica-led Kubernetes demonstration. At that time, the Q Engineering team expressed their interest in deploying a Kubernetes cluster for the business value it could provide, but lacked the time and resources required to learn how to do it themselves. They wanted a solution with a scalable backend infrastructure and had developed a prototype, but needed help to scale it, make improvements, and deploy it. The team realized that Onica could help them attain their goal of implementing a Kubernetes solution in a short time frame.

“It would have been difficult for us to accomplish what we wanted to do in such a short time without Onica’s expert assistance. They helped us define our vision for the Kubernetes cluster on AWS that we wanted to deliver to our customers and built exactly what we needed. By having Onica do all of the backend infrastructure, it allowed us to accomplish what a team five times our size could accomplish. It’s been a great relationship working with Onica.”
James Ruiz
Co-Founder of Q Engineering

OUTCOMES

Kubernetes Containers on AWS

After speaking with an Onica representative, Q Engineering signed up for Cloud OpsPilot, Onica’s cloud managed service that provides access to a group of Onica engineers who work collaboratively with the customer, using an Agile development method with work done in defined and measurable sprints. As part of the ongoing engagement, Q Engineering also receives 24/7 cloud support from the same team of engineers, with defined response-time SLAs, ensuring any critical needs or issues are resolved rapidly.

Onica developed an Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) solution, integrated with a CI/CD pipeline based on AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodePipeline. Combining the speed of Kubernetes with a fully integrated pipeline allowed Q Engineering to rapidly deploy an application. The unparalleled scalability of Kubernetes on AWS allows for handling current and future workloads without concern, in addition to migrating legacy applications to the Amazon EKS cluster with ease.

Onica and Q Engineering worked together as a team on this project, with Onica providing training during development. The team held weekly work sessions, during which subject matter experts provided insight into what they were doing, and also how Q Engineering could optimize their workflow. There was a significant amount of knowledge transfer from Onica to Q Engineering. Onica trained Q Engineering staff on how to use their code pipeline to update clusters with new code in order to test and roll out to production. In addition to this, updates to production servers, instances, and the backend were automated by Onica. This sped up Q Engineering’s development process tremendously from their old method, going from hours to minutes to complete updates. Onica was also there to assist in troubleshooting and resolve blocking issues that Q Engineering encountered.

Onica built development and production Amazon EKS clusters and a CI/CD pipeline which provided the scalability, flexibility, and security that Q Engineering needed.  

Onica used the following technologies and tools as part of the solution:

  • Amazon EC2: Q Engineering’s Amazon EKS cluster, proxy tier, and supporting infrastructure rely on Amazon EC2
  • Amazon RDS: Q Engineering utilizes both Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora RDS for customer and routing databases
  • Amazon EKS: Amazon EKS does all of the container orchestration for Q Engineering’s application and all future applications that will be migrated to the platform
  • AWS Lambda: Onica uses AWS Lambda to perform automated backups and monitoring solutions
  • AWS CodeBuild: A key part of Q Engineering’s pipeline that builds their application and pushes to Amazon ECR is AWS CodeBuild, this is also used to deploy infrastructure that Onica built as IaC and updates the Amazon EKS cluster
  • AWS CodePipeline: A key part of the pipeline, AWS CodePipeline is used to manage various AWS CodeBuild projects
  • Amazon CloudWatch: Amazon CloudWatch events are utilized to trigger AWS CodePipeline and all monitoring of Q Engineering’s environment is done via Amazon CloudWatch, including pod logs

“It would have been difficult for us to accomplish what we wanted to do in such a short time without Onica’s expert assistance,” said James Ruiz, co-founder of Q Engineering. “They helped us define our vision for the Kubernetes cluster on AWS that we wanted to deliver to our customers and built exactly what we needed. By having Onica do all of the backend infrastructure, it allowed us to accomplish what a team five times our size could accomplish. It’s been a great relationship working with Onica.”

Why Us

Why Onica

Onica is one of the largest and fastest-growing Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partners in the world, helping companies enable, operate, and innovate in the cloud. From migration strategy to operational excellence and immersive transformation, Onica is a full spectrum AWS integrator. Learn more at www.onica.com.