Conductor improves Ignition Group’s developer productivity while increasing product reliability.

Ignition Group is one of the largest technology companies in South Africa, with a mission to empower consumers, entrepreneurs, and organizations to integrate into the digital ecosystem. They specialize in a range of technology solutions, including traditional business process outsourcing, digital marketing, e-commerce, and logistics, to improve the lives of clients in South Africa and all over the world.

A high-scale payment system with Dapr

A core component of Ignition Group’s portfolio is their AI-powered Payment System. This system has over 100 microservices running in production on Kubernetes and bills over a million transactions per month. Due to the critical nature of this service, it is extremely important that the system is available and reliable and that the development team can quickly identify and solve problems across the platform.

The Payment System, at its core, depends on open-source Dapr for asynchronous communication with underlying message queues and state management capabilities. Ignition Group has been a user of the Dapr project since its inception in 2019, and it has become an essential part of their business solutions ever since.

It was for this reason they decided to become an early adopter of Diagrid Conductor in 2022, and Dapr, along with Conductor, now operates the entire back end of Ignition Group’s sales business, meaning every sale made goes through Dapr and is made visible by Diagrid Conductor.

Reduce strain on enterprise resources

Diagrid Conductor is designed to reduce the resources needed to manage Dapr by giving developers vital insights into their application without having to resort to Ops monitoring tools, as well as keeping them informed on how to apply best practices, prevent misconfigurations, and secure applications. Ignition Group has found that using Conductor to manage Dapr microservices, has increased the stability of their system and saved up to one day a month in developer time performing routine Dapr maintenance tasks such as Dapr upgrades.

Best-practice analysis and recommendations

Dapr on its own has built-in features to improve reliability and security, but they are time-consuming to keep on top of. By providing over 40 built-in production recommendations, Conductor’s Advisor has made it much easier for Ignition Group to manage Dapr on Kubernetes.

Enhanced Observability 

Using Conductor, the Ignition Group team has gained unparalleled visibility into their applications and infrastructure using the telemetry data generated and collected by over 150 unique Dapr metrics. Conductor tracks the health of your entire system and shows you when there is a problem, with built-in alerts for every important Dapr metric. Teams at Ignition Group have reported a time savings of up to 60 minutes to detect and respond to a Dapr application or infrastructure error, saving developer time and avoiding potential system downtime.

Enterprise Dapr Support

Along with the Conductor SaaS service, Ignition Group can also take advantage of enterprise Dapr support with their contract. Since Dapr is an open-source project, any issues typically need to go through public channels such as GitHub issues or the community Discord server. This process can be quite time-consuming, depending on the issue, and can leave users without a fix until the next open-source version of the project. To alleviate this pain for users, Diagrid has dedicated engineering resources who can diagnose and solve upstream issues within the project within 72 hours and who can work on highly requested features in the project. With the success of the sales business running using Diagrid Conductor, Ignition Group has continued to onboard more applications to the platform and now supports the back-end system processing customer orders from South Africa and the USA.

Operate Dapr in Production With Confidence

At Ignition Group, Conductor significantly reduces the effort required to maintain a cutting-edge Dapr application in a Kubernetes environment and improves their experience running Dapr at scale in production.