Revolutionizing Infrastructure: How Cold Bore Capital Leveraged Pilotcore's Expertise for a Scalable Cloud-Native Transformation
Executive Summary
Cold Bore Capital, a private equity firm based in Chicago, Illinois, faced challenges with managing and scaling their existing virtual machine infrastructure. This infrastructure was integral to their machine learning workloads and data engineering tasks. To enhance their business efficiency, they collaborated with Pilotcore to transition to a scalable, cloud-native infrastructure. The partnership led to improved automation, faster data engineering workflows, and better system reliability.
About Cold Bore Capital
Cold Bore Capital specialize in repositioning and growing micro-cap companies in high-growth, recession-resistant industries. With a transaction value exceeding $5 billion USD, their operations heavily rely on machine learning and data engineering workloads.
Cold Bore Capital's manual management of virtual machines hindered operational efficiency, leading to potential system failures and time-consuming maintenance. To address this, they sought to adopt infrastructure-as-code patterns to enhance their infrastructure, aiming to focus on deriving value from their data rather than managing infrastructure.
The Challenge
Cold Bore Capital's daily operations were reliant on manually configured virtual machines. This traditional method of managing workloads became problematic due to the risk of system failures and potentially extended recovery times. Each time an update was required or an issue arose, manual intervention was necessary, which was both time-consuming and prone to errors. The inconsistencies in configurations could lead to unpredictable results.
The manual maintenance of cloud servers was taking a toll on the efficiency of their operations. The tedious process of accessing running instances directly over SSH, applying necessary changes, and then manually replicating these across their platforms was hindering their business growth. If left unaddressed, the situation could have led to severe business risks due to potential system failures and long recovery times.
To mitigate these risks, Cold Bore Capital aimed to modernize its infrastructure. They aimed to broaden their use of infrastructure-as-code patterns, hoping to build a more sophisticated and reliable framework for their business logic. Their ultimate objective was to shift their focus from managing infrastructure to maximizing the value they derived from their data.
Why Cold Bore Capital Chose Pilotcore
Cold Bore Capital chose to collaborate with Pilotcore for their proficiency in cloud infrastructure. Pilotcore's reputation for helping small to medium-sized businesses achieve operational efficiencies was a significant factor in Cold Bore Capital's decision. Cold Bore Capital was impressed by Pilotcore's approach to their challenge, which included providing a turnkey solution designed to meet their unique requirements.
Why Cold Bore Capital Chose AWS
Cold Bore Capital chose AWS as their cloud platform due to its robust, scalable, and highly customizable solutions. AWS's extensive suite of services provided the foundation to develop an infrastructure that catered to Cold Bore Capital's unique requirements. The decision to opt for AWS was also motivated by the promise of consistent, error-free deployments across accounts, leading to operational efficiency.
The Solution
Pilotcore successfully built and delivered a completely new architecture for Cold Bore Capital based on Kubernetes and Terraform infrastructure-as-code (IaC) within two months. This new infrastructure allowed Cold Bore Capital to configure their workflows efficiently and deploy them across accounts consistently, thereby reducing errors and streamlining their core business operations.
The solution included two main components. First, Pilotcore deployed an entirely new custom-designed cloud infrastructure. Second, they architected and deployed a data pipeline platform based on Apache Airflow and MLflow running in Kubernetes.
To ensure consistent deployments across accounts, Pilotcore leveraged HashiCorp Terraform and Gruntwork's Terragrunt. These tools reduced code repetition, mitigated potential errors, and increased the speed and reliability of infrastructure deployment.
Pilotcore also used AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to create a Kubernetes cluster as part of the new infrastructure. With this service, Cold Bore Capital could seamlessly deploy new applications from their IaC repository. Pilotcore further prepared production-ready Kubernetes deployments of Cold Bore Capital's applications.
For cost-effective usage, Pilotcore introduced Cold Bore Capital to AWS Fargate. This service abstracts underlying EC2 instances, allowing the pods in the Kubernetes cluster to be scheduled with the exact resources they need, thereby minimizing costs.
Pilotcore also developed a Terraform module for deploying MLflow using the Helm release. This solution simplified the usage of MLflow for Cold Bore Capital, enabling their data team to focus more on creating state-of-the-art models and less on configuration.
Results & Benefits
The implementation of Pilotcore's solution led to numerous benefits for Cold Bore Capital.
Enhanced automation
They achieved enhanced automation for infrastructure, platform, and software, resulting in easier management. The faster release of data engineering workflows, applications, and model deployments accelerated their business operations.
Improved system reliability
The improved system reliability in terms of achievable service level objectives (SLOs) led to enhanced business continuity. Cold Bore Capital also benefited from the auto-provisioning using GitOps and the scalability of the entire platform.
Improved data science workflow
The solution also improved the consistency of the exploration workflow for data scientists both on and off-cloud. These improvements led to substantial time savings and significant reduction in IT costs.
