Building XCP:
scalable AWS landing-zone and container platform at xxllnc

The xxllnc group is a leading collection of software development companies that serve the Dutch government. In 2019, xxllnc acquired zaaksysteem.nl, which Evil8 had previously migrated to Amazon Web Services. The platform was rebranded as xxllnc zaken. Since then, many other government-focused software development companies have joined the xxllnc group. These companies and their applications are diverse, with varying IT infrastructures, software development approaches, and cloud-native maturity.

To provide a seamless experience for government agencies using these applications, we helped design an IT strategy that resulted in the development of the xxllnc cloud platform (XCP). Designed to support the rapid growth of software development teams and applications within the xxllnc group, XCP is an AWS landing zone and a multi-tenant, self-service Kubernetes (EKS) platform that allows for easy integration of the various applications, without requiring additional resources in the platform team. It solves infrastructural challenges faced by the development teams, such as monitoring, developer self-service, load balancing, certificate management, scaling to meet changing customer demand, auto-recovery and high-availability, and government-required security and compliance. XCP has already resulted in cost savings of 70% on IT infrastructure for individual teams, and further adoption is expected to lead to even greater savings for the group as a whole.

The platform team plays a key role in onboarding new teams by offering guidance, training, and sharing the successes of their peers. Our goal is to provide “paved roads” for these teams, making it easy for them to get up and running quickly and efficiently on XCP. This includes advising teams on how to make changes to their applications so that they are most suitable for deployment within XCP.