MST Helix Delivery
Standardized delivery automation — Success story
About the Company
MST Global (MST) is an Australian company specializing in the development of safety, communication, and production management systems for the mining and tunneling industries. Founded in 1990, MST has grown to serve over 300 customers worldwide. Initially focused on hardware sales, MST made a strategic shift in 2017 towards offering complete hardware and software solutions for its clients. Its product line includes a range of IoT sensors and safety and communication equipment, all controlled by complex real-time software systems. Their next-generation product line, Helix, is built on modern technologies, including microservices and microfrontend architecture.
Challenges
A few months before releasing the Helix Platform MVP, the MST Global team began considering the complexities of system release and deployment.
Helix was composed of numerous microservices on the backend, microapplications on the frontend, and software components for various edge devices. This vast system had to be packaged into modular units, allowing different combinations of modules to be purchased and installed by clients. The complexity of packaging, releasing, and deploying these components was overwhelming and exceeded the available DevOps skills within the MST team.
Faced with these challenges, MST approached Enterprise Innovation Consulting for assistance through the Better Delivery program to automate the delivery of the Helix platform.
The Solution We Proposed
To ensure a complete turn-key solution, MST Global opted for the Premium Package of the Better Delivery program.
The automated delivery system needed to manage Golang and Node.js microservices, Golang edge applications, and Angular microfrontends. These components had to pass through multiple automated and manual quality gates, be packaged into deployable modules, and then released into production.
The system was integrated with MST's existing infrastructure, which included BitBucket for source code version control and builds, JFrog Artifactory for release repositories, and Kubernetes clusters on bare-metal hardware for deployment. This comprehensive automation framework would streamline the complex release and deployment process of the Helix platform.
What We Did
The first few weeks focused on gathering requirements and designing the Helix Delivery Platform, with an emphasis on creating a custom packaging solution that would allow flexible deployment configurations based on the modules purchased by clients.
We then automated CI/CD pipelines for backend, frontend, and edge components, ensuring they passed through both automated and manual quality gates.
Deployment environments were scripted using self-managed services, with non-redundant test environments hosted on AWS VMs, while the production environment was deployed on bare-metal hardware on-premises.
To meet MST's unique and complex requirements, we developed custom PowerShell scripts to handle the product packaging. To provide visibility and control over the entire delivery process, the platform included a Delivery Dashboard built using Prometheus and Grafana, offering real-time insights into the delivery status.
The vertical slice of the platform was built using real Helix components developed during the MVP stage. Once the delivery process was thoroughly tested, we provided training to MST's internal DevOps team to ensure they could operate and maintain the platform. Over the next few months, our team continued to assist MST's DevOps specialists with more complex tasks, ensuring a smooth transition and full adoption of the platform.
The Result
In less than three months, MST Global received a fully automated delivery platform for their new Helix product, supporting the entire lifecycle—build, testing, release, and deployment.
The custom packaging and deployment solution enabled flexible deployment scenarios, tailored to each client's purchased configurations.
MST's internal DevOps specialists were fully trained to maintain and extend the platform independently, though they continued to seek assistance from EIC for more complex scenarios.
The delivery platform has been in use for over six years as the Helix product has grown and evolved, consistently meeting MST's customer needs and adapting to the platform’s ongoing expansion.
Performance Improvements:
● 5x faster implementation compared to an in-house solution, accounting for the learning curve and trial-and-error approach of the internal team
● 2x reduction in maintenance effort thanks to the unified pipeline design and implementation
● 25% lower infrastructure costs compared to a non-optimized approach using non-differentiated deployment environments
Testimonial
Vadim Parfenov
Chief Technology Officer
MST Global
We were gearing up to launch our Helix platform, but the complexity of its architecture — microservices, microfrontends, and edge components — made release and deployment a real challenge for our DevOps team.
That’s when we brought in Enterprise Innovation Consulting, and they delivered a complete solution. In under three months, they built a fully automated delivery platform that handled everything from building and testing to packaging and deployment, all while allowing for flexible client configurations.
The custom packaging solution they developed fit our needs perfectly, and their CI/CD pipeline made the whole process seamless. Our DevOps team was trained to manage and extend the platform, and though we still reach out to EIC for more complex tasks, we’ve been able to operate it smoothly on our own.
Six years later, the platform is still going strong, adapting as Helix has evolved. It’s saved us a ton of time and resources—implementation was five times faster, maintenance is much easier, and our infrastructure costs have dropped significantly. This platform has been crucial to the success and ongoing growth of Helix.
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