Cheese Smells, Containers Don’t!

Chitale Dairy has been not just an early, but a long-standing, adopter of virtualisation and IT abstraction. Recently it hit a ‘shift’ button and entered the new pastures of containerisation. Let’s see what it takes to milk agility and extract lean weights from an existing IT infrastructure - with new-age solutions. Let’s see what happens when IT does not sit idly like cheese to get better and tastier; but is, instead, always up and running. Here’s a chat with Vishvas Chitale, CEO and CTO, of Chitale Dairy.

From cans to containers – what made you move to this extreme side of software-isation?

Chitale Dairy has been using virtualisation for 20 years. All through these decades, the landscape has completely changed. Specially in the post-pandemic era. We suddenly saw customers ordering from their couches. This meant that we had to reinvent digitalisation for both our customers and farmers. We needed rapid application deployment. That’s when we thought of containers. We first did a ‘lift-and-shift’ with another tool. But we soon realized we also need scalability and a Cloud-smart platform to help us steer the on-premise and Cloud workloads well. That’s when we decided on a tool from VMWare that also packed a seamless experience- Tanzu.

We wanted to digitize every aspect of its business, from animal feed procurement to delivering dairy products to customers. We decided to modernize its business-critical application with Tanzu. With this move, Chitale Dairy modernised existing applications and developed a hybrid cloud environment.

Is the jump from VMs to containers slippery in any way?

Not, we can work easily in both worlds with the infrastructure we have now. VMware gives us seamless integration of vCentres with Tanzu. Hence, not much change or challenge for us. What was interesting is that we undertook all this during the pandemic – so a lot of work had to be done remotely. But the platform does not bring any surprises. Except for minor issues like rebuilding the pipelines and small integration work, everything went smooth – despite this shift being a massive change done without people being on the site.

Also, VMware’s premier partner, Sunfire Technologies, worked with our development team to containerise existing apps, implement an agile DevOps methodology and build continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

Does it become easier with native workloads? Instead of legacy workloads?

We started with a ‘lift-and-shift’ approach and then decided to go the native route to tap real benefits of containerisation with scalability. We gave a fresh touch to all the applications.

How is this decision delivering, so far?

It has helped the dairy accelerate the delivery of new capabilities and boost efficiency while providing the flexibility to capitalise on multi-cloud environments in the future. We have  streamlined our application development and deployment processes, and got to faster time-to-market for new products and services. Plus, there is improvement in overall agility, scalability, and security.

Does more software mean more security cracks?

Not at all. Containers are, per se, inherently, strong on security. You are spinning the master copy and using it only when you need it. Else, the container goes back. From Kuberneters orchestration to pipeline level, security is strong everywhere. And everything is checked across the chain – from developers to production in the DevSecOps set-up.

Will VMs stay relevant?

We will see more conversations around microservices. Specially with products like Tanzu, you can really become agile and do it in a scalable way. Everyone can make ‘Khichdi’ – the ingredients are the same. But in our experience, VMware knows how to mix it all well. They make it like we like it.”

How useful is IT for cutting down carbon footprint?

It can be used in many ways – direct and indirect. By using data on blood profiles for better animal healthcare, by enabling reduced use of pesticides and reduced wastage. We can use route optimisation for farmers to do all that.

What’s on your whiteboard next?

We are trying to make the lives of farmers easy in every way possible. We would try a lot of ways to do that- predictive modeling, data mining, forecasting, plant modeling etc. Just imagine how much value can be added to product improvement if a farmer can wipe away antibiotic residues, if a farmer can have food chain transparency, if a farmer can use genetic sequencing for better cow selection.  It’s not just about the company’s business. When we look at the recent food crisis and geo-political effects on agriculture, we are strongly reminded of the paradox in India. We are biggest producers of milk and yet our per animal productivity needs a lot of improvement. With IT, we want to improve it ten times. So far, we have come to 4X and 5X and we will surely get t 10X soon.

Byline- Pratima H