Advanced Customisation & Engineering - ACE Team

Many of the products that Integralis sells can be customised to better fit customers’ unique environments. Such customisations often require unique skills, including detailed knowledge of the product itself and the ability to develop custom code and scripts.

To help meet the needs of customers and to deliver a first class
service, Integralis recently set up its Advanced Customisation and Engineering,or ACE team. The team comprises a dedicated group of professional software engineers with in depth knowledge of a limited set of products, and thus the ability to offer advanced customisation and support services.

One of the first products to have attracted the interest of the ACE team is the F5 BigIP range. F5 is a leading player in the application delivery market and has a well established customer base. It also has an excellent customisation engine, known as iRules, which allows the development of scripts that run on the company’s range of application delivery controllers. Those iRules can be used to customise the functionality of the BigIP devices in order to provide functionality specific to individual customers’ requirements. F5 also publishes an API, known as iControl, enabling the development of custom applications. The ACE team offers full life-cycle services around both iRules and iControl applications. From initial requirements specification to development, testing and full production support services, the ACE Team focuses on giving customers the confidence that a customised installation is still fully supported. To ensure that the expertise offered by the ACE team is second to none, there are two former F5 consultants on board, with a total of 9 years’ experience working for F5 in a training and support capacity. They bring to the team an unsurpassed level of detailed knowledge, both of the F5 devices and specifically ASM.

Best Practice

From the start, the ACE team members always follow best practice. Development of customised solutions takes place within a shared code repository environment with full task-based change management and revision control in place. An object oriented approach is taken everywhere, and all procedures and units are fully tested and QA’d prior to deployment. Specific attention is taken to document both the code and the architecture, to ensure the system remains supportable and extendable in years to come. In addition to producing bespoke applications for customers using iControl, the ACE team is also working on a collection of off-the-shelf products for general availability. One example is an AutoBackup tool. Designed to run as a service on a Windows server, it provides a configurable schedule to create and fetch archive (backup) files from F5 devices. These are then stored on the Windows server rather than the F5 device in order to provide additional resilience.

More Information
If you want to hire the ACE team, speak to your regular Integralis contact, call 0118 930 6060, or email uk.info@integralis.com.