Tek Yantra
Empowering Organizations with Speed and Scalability

Only a handful of enterprises would argue that speed and innovation are indispensable factors for achieving success in today’s digital world. The ability to innovate faster and enable more agile delivery of technology and services has become a competitive advantage across industries—more so in COVID times. While the pandemic, in a manner of speaking, has brought the world to a standstill, there has been unanimity in setting the tone for digital transformation and implementing digital technologies to not only stay connected but to stay impactful.

In the government sector, the transformation—brought about through the implementation of the latest technologies—has often been challenging in the wake of rigid traditional models and legacy resources in place. The introduction of DevOps has been a savior for organizations, including government agencies, to help them iterate and roll out services quickly and be more agile with product enhancements and faster integration. Despite leveraging diverse automation tools, the DevOps teams often miss the mark while delivering the products to their customers in a timely manner. This is precisely what Tek Yantra intends to change.

As an IT consulting and software development company, Tek Yantra works in close partnership with organizations to assist them in technology implementation and development. When it comes to enabling digital transformation in the government sector, Tek Yantra is in a class by itself, empowering organizations to keep up with globalization, budget cutbacks, and increased citizen expectations through digital transformation strategies, technology delivery, and citizen-led innovation. “As an organization, we focus on leveraging open-source software in development, implementation, and consulting services that are delivered to the clients to reduce the cost, increase the speed to market, and get the business benefits. However, we also collaborate and support proprietary software as and when needed for the clients,” says Swapna Narla, CEO, Tek Yantra. “We specialize in empowering the organizations by helping them in their digital journey and also partner with our clients for technology implementation and development.”

Improved Speed and Scalability

With its core expertise in cloud transformation, DevOps, and full-stack development, Tek Yantra provides its clients with cloud services, DevOps as a Service, open-source tool implementation, application design and development, IT consulting and operations support and much more. Tek Yantra takes pride in enabling stability, security, scalability, and availability for numerous clients in the government sector. Currently, the company is working closely with the California government to help them in technology implementation for better serving the citizens. “We are behind the stability, scalability, and availability of websites like covid19.ca.gov, response.ca.gov, and more, supporting the government to build the infrastructure for these websites. As a matter of fact, we build and deliver the infrastructure to the government in record time,” states Swapna.

In yet another impressive feat, with regard to the recent PG&E outage, Tek Yantra played an instrumental role in helping the state IT team to overcome the technical issues. Tek Yantra’s cloud services along with California Department of Technology aided PG&E to recover from this outage and stabilize their IT. “We delivered the response.ca.gov to the California government’s DevOps departments and built the infrastructure, which handles nearly 50,000 concurrent users every time. We witnessed 500,000 users during PG&E outage, whereas for the covid.ca.gov, the website was being accessed by close to 260,000 users at the same time. We built and delivered all the infrastructure—that can scale remarkably and handle millions of users—in a record time of five hours,” informs Tek Yantra’s Board Advisor, Sree, who is also cloud security consulting and infrastructure solution architect at the California Department of Technology.

Sree goes on to elaborate that Tek Yantra brings its process- and solution-driven expertise, the ability to always be on the cutting edge and the skills required to understand legacy and industry challenges to enable speed and scalability. Tek Yantra is contributing to the success of numerous organizations, empowering them with the benefits of the latest technologies and building everything in the cloud. However, Sree underscores the importance of following the right practices, such as working closely with the development teams to help them build the pipeline and get their code to production.

For assisting organizations in achieving the best-in-class development/delivery pipeline, Tek Yantra integrates clients’ delivery systems and creates and maintains a fully automated solution that enables them to focus on building a continuously improving organization. Moreover, the company equips its clients with DevOps best practices, instrumenting a continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline that automates the process of building software, packaging applications, deploying them to target environments, and making service calls to enable the application.

As an organization, we focus on leveraging open-source software in development, implementation, and consulting services that are delivered to the clients to reduce the cost, increase the speed to market, and get the business benefits

“For enabling this DevOps as a Service, we stabilize and build reusable pipelines that can be customized to the different project requirements and can be run to build the infrastructure and deploy the code,” says Sree. While Government agencies tend to take two or three months in delivering the infrastructure and in the data center translation processes, with infrastructure as code approach, Tek Yantra focuses not only on building, testing, and deploying the pipeline but also on the infrastructural code development that enables the reproduction of the infrastructure, at any instant. This can also be regarded as an infrastructure-as-a-pipeline approach.

The uniqueness of Tek Yantra stems from its ability to support its clients’ infrastructure and helps their development teams following the traditional waterfall approach make a shift to Agile. While this is not a one-day transformation, the company leverages hybrid Agile that involves working with the client’s existing legacy processes alongside using Agile codes for delivery, citing them the value and benefits, for them to slowly start implementing Agile. Additionally, Tek Yantra has deployed four products—Yantra Bot, Yantra Cloud Builder, etc. —all of which are still in the alpha phase. The company leverages knowledge from every customer; for instance, it works with cloud providers like Azure and AWS to develop the templatized reusable framework to build vendor-agnostic products on the move.

Mitigating Challenges along the Way

Typically, Tek Yantra is approached by organizations that struggle in delivering products and services to their customers in a timely fashion. These organizations often invest heavily in different cutting-edge automation tools that meet their specific requirements. “When it comes to selling the products, their clients lack the understanding to use and integrate these tools,” reveals Peddi. Besides, these enterprises are also faced with the daunting task of keeping up with the ever-changing skills and requirements in terms of the code applications, along with the security, compliance and other infrastructure-related provisions. Evidently, most organizations in the government sector lack the ability to secure digital products and services while accelerating the speed at which they are built. Tek Yantra steps in to change this narrative through its expert services.

Considering security as the top-most priority and not an afterthought, Tek Yantra stands on a belief that security is not a separate practice and is effective in all the aspects of the development process. “Security should be inbuilt in DevOps pipeline and integrated into DevOps practices and culture. At Tek Yantra, we reinforce our pipelines by embedding security in every aspect—from the developer’s code to the product to the ultimate market production,” explains Sree. In doing so, the company helps clients to implement DevSecOps practices to automate core security tasks by embedding security early in the DevOps workflow.

Providing security at every step of the delivery starts right from the developer’s laptop itself, which is enabled with security tools that perform vulnerability scanning and fixes every existing security issue. For this security vulnerability scanning, Tek Yantra uses tools to perform static composition analysis on the developer’s laptop until it goes to production and is made live for the public. Security tools reports back the vulnerabilities of the infrastructure or code, freeing up the staff from the daily responsibility of scanning.

Moving ahead of its time, Tek Yantra is also implementing managed services on the cloud, bringing to light the best practices and frameworks needed by the Azure and AWS users. Tek Yantra is additionally enhancing its focus on the managed DevOps area. Tek Yantra plans to enhance its managed cloud services and envisions simplifying processes for the customers implementing DevOps and the cloud services.