A1 MACEDONIA
“Predictive network maintenance, autonomous network management and digital twins will be the next big thing in telco”
Aleksandar Gichevski Head of IT Services & Architecture A1 Macedonia
Rebuilding, not just moving, the stack More than 45 % of A1 Macedonia’ s local IT applications have now been migrated to the cloud, across a target on two platforms. The first is Exoscale, a European cloud service provider owned by A1 Group, which the company sees as the“ European alternative” to giants like AWS or Google Cloud. Launched in 2011, it has carved out a niche by focusing on simplicity, high performance and – most importantly – strict adherence to European data privacy laws. This is something Aleksandar is quick to highlight, especially considering the current regulatory and geopolitical climate.
The second target for A1 Macedonia is a local installation of Red Hat OpenShift Environment – which is an enterprise-grade Kubernetes container platform designed for hybrid cloud environments, enabling organisations to build, deploy and scale applications rapidly. Based on Kubernetes, it provides integrated tools, enhanced security and consistent operations.
The decision to avoid lift-and-shift – the practice of moving a legacy application to the cloud without modifying it – was a deliberate one. Aleksandar and his team chose instead to refactor applications before migration, rewriting them to take advantage of cloud-native architecture. Although a slower path, Aleksandar insists the results have validated the technique.
“ Our approach has been: move it to the cloud, but make it cloudnative first; move it to the cloud, but refactor it first,” he affirms.
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