At Samsung, we strive to deliver the best customer experience. This means we’re continuously investing in advanced tools and solutions to lead digital transformation for enterprises around the world. To meet the growing demands of the B2B market, the Samsung Knox team has been making great efforts to modernize Knox cloud solutions for our customers. 

These modernizations include scaling our database to accommodate growing customer requests, rethinking our platform’s architecture, and continuously improving the functionality of Knox cloud solutions.

We’re committed to ensuring smooth business operations for our customers—read on to discover how the modernization efforts will benefit our customers. 

Key benefits of modernization

• Scalability: To support our growing customers and data, we moved our activity log data to OpenSearch. Log data is now easier to retrieve. 
• Stability: We adopted the emerging container technology to manage our growing customer requests and increasing number of services. With containerization, our Knox cloud services can automatically scale up or down based on the volume of requests they receive.
• Flexibility: To consistently and quickly deliver the most up-to-date features and services, we implemented a micro-frontend architecture. We can now deliver new features to customers faster than before with the micro-frontend approach.

Scaling up our database to handle growing data

With the increasing number of devices and queries that Knox cloud solutions need to handle, a new technical approach is required to manage activity log data appropriately. We made the decision to transition to OpenSearch so that users can request log data in real time. 

OpenSearch also offers the following benefits:

• Compatibility: OpenSearch can be customized with a variety of plugins that enhance its search, security, and analytics functionality. It’s also a familiar architecture, so it’s easier to maintain. 
• Efficiency: Distributed processing allows us to scale resources to increase capacity and performance, and allocate them according to demand. 

Streamlining the customer experience with micro-frontend architecture

We adopted a micro-frontend architecture for the Knox Admin Portal by breaking it into smaller, self-contained service components. To understand why we did this, let’s learn more about the Knox Admin Portal. 

What is the Knox Admin Portal?

To put it simply, the Knox Admin Portal is a large front-end project that unifies admin consoles for Knox cloud services into one convenient portal. It streamlines operations for enterprise IT admins, and its original architecture design meant that all Knox cloud solutions needed to be updated together in one big bang release.  Changing the frontend of one service meant all services had to be updated, leading to more development and testing time.

Introducing the new and improved Knox Admin Portal

We invested in improving the Knox Admin Portal’s architecture in an effort to: 

• Improve how quickly and seamlessly we can serve customer requests
• Ensure our infrastructure can accommodate our business growth 

The Knox Admin Portal has been reimagined with micro-frontend architecture, empowering teams to independently update each service. All services share common frontend libraries, but they can be built and deployed separately. This new architecture means that service-level features can be added faster and with less risk. Testing can be isolated to particular modules, making it easier to create thorough test cases, pinpoint issues, and resolve them. These strategic efforts yield an advanced user-centric experience for our Knox customers.

A portal alternative: The Knox Webhook Notification API

To accommodate customer requests to host Knox cloud services on their solutions and for ease of their operations, we introduced the Knox Webhook Notification API. Previously, these customers often had to use synchronous API calls for heavy operations, and each of these calls needed to maintain an open connection to the server. This process tends to consume resources on both ends.  

That’s why we built the Knox Webhook Notification API, as an asynchronous alternative to resource-intensive client requests. Now, instead of making individual API calls and waiting for a response from the Knox server, developers can subscribe to our API to receive change notifications when an event or background process is complete. 

What does all this mean for customers? Faster time-to-market for features, quicker bug fixes, and improved service performance. 

Final notes on modernizing Knox cloud solutions 

At the heart of our B2B journey lies a commitment to empowering our valued customers. As we experience remarkable business growth and customer requests, our dedication to innovation and improving the customer experience remains unwavering. We’re proud to continuously find new ways to make it easier for our customers to manage corporate devices with the greatest efficiency and ease. 

While prioritizing scalability, stability, and flexibility, we’re enhancing the customer experience for Knox users by:

• Fulfilling customer requests faster than ever by introducing OpenSearch,
• Building the Knox Webhook Notification API to cater to the customized needs of our customers,
• Modernizing our systems with containerization to support a future of high-growth and scalability for Knox cloud solutions, and
• Offering faster time-to-market for features, and quicker bug fixes with micro-frontend architecture.

With these improvements, our goal is to create the best Knox cloud solution experience for years to come.