By coordinating between the teams at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) and Shifter, we were able to develop custom architecture and design to create an internal facing employee site in a short amount of time.
About MHI
Head Office Address: 3-2-3 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-8332, Japan
https://www.mhi.com/
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. is engaged in the manufacture of machinery in the fields of power generation, aviation, defense and space, as well as industry infrastructure (industrial machinery).
Site Specifications
We were able to quickly implement Auth0: an authentication, and authorization mechanism that allows only employees who have logged into the internal system to access the site. We were also able to use the Shifter Webhook function and AWS CodeDeploy in order to establish a mechanism for continuous deployment to Amazon S3.
DigitalCube’s Role
- Defining the scope of the site and development coordination support
- Site architecture study, basic design support, technical verification support, and online technical support during site construction
- Development of CloudFormation in order to create AWS environments
- Configuration documentation for Auth0 integration
Configuration Overview
Site Publishing Flow
- Generate the site with Shifter Static
- Once generation is complete, send a POST request to the API set in Shifter Outgoing Webhook at Generate
- Amazon API Gateway receives the request and launches AWS Lambda
- Execute the AWS CodeBuild build with the download URL of the tgz file in the body of the POST request set as an environment variable
- AWS CodeBuild downloads and extracts the tgz file from the URL set in the environment variable, and uploads it to the specified Amazon S3 bucket
Authentication method for site visitors
- The user accesses the static file placed in S3 via Amazon CloudFront
- Lambda@edge checks the user’s session information, and if the user is not logged in, the user is redirected to the login screen using Auth0.
Interview
About the interviewee
Kentaro Kawaguchi, General Manager, Digital Experience Promotion Office, Growth Promotion Office, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd.
Mr. Kawaguchi manages the Software Engineering Department in the SoE area. He first encountered DigitalCube when he decided to adopt Shifter to host a tech blog in order to introduce his department’s initiatives to the company. The decision to use Shifter was made in order to reduce the operational workload of managing servers and WordPress.
DigitalCube (DC): Could you tell us about the website where you are using Shifter?
Mr. Kawaguchi (KK): We are using Shifter for our tech blog, which introduces our department’s initiatives to the company. Several articles a week are posted by the members.
DC: How did you find out about Shifter? And why did you decide to use it?
KK: I came across Shifter while searching for a way to reduce the operational load of managing servers and WordPress.
DC: Before using Shifter, how did you perform related tasks?
KK: In general, there are cases where information is shared using SharePoint and the like.
Now we are using Shifter to improve administrative and operational tasks and leveraging Digital Cube’s professional services to achieve SaaS integration
DC: How has your work been improved by using Shifter?
KK: It has improved our operational tasks such as managing the server and WordPress.
DC: Did you have any particular requirements in mind when implementing Shifter?
KK: We used Auth0, an iDaaS service, for our internal website. We asked Digital Cube to assist us in setting up this system.
Mr. Kawaguchi also provided us with feedback regarding his experience using Shifter
KK: I think it would be more useful if there was a function to complete user management and article posting by only using Shifter.
With Shifter, you can enjoy the benefits of serverless while keeping the functionality of WordPress, and I think you can easily achieve many things you want to do. If you do not require dynamic processing, I recommend considering Shifter.
This case study serves as a helpful, concrete example of how MHI is quickly realizing advanced initiatives utilizing digital technology.
Rather than leaving all the construction to an external vendor, implementing their site in-house and utilizing Shifter’s support for defining the site’s requirements as well as coordinating development seems to be the basis for future speedy digital applications using SaaS and cloud computing.
