_Windchill integration with Kubernetes: Streamlining design of luxury goods in PLM

Project Background

A prestigious luxury brand group – known for its exceptional craftsmanship in high-end watches, jewelry, fashion, and accessories, with a worldwide footprint across luxury markets in Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Americas, and the Middle East – is always chasing the most modern technologies, hence it’s one of the first companies that started using the Kubernetes platform along with Docker containers to host Windchill in development environments. It was a huge shift from an old school Virtual Machine-based approach, and new ways of working with this new environment had to be created from scratch.

Business Challenges

• A completely new way of development process has to be created to interact with the Windchill stack deployed in the company’s cloud on the Anthos-based Kubernetes engine.
  
• A new development interface had to be created for running deployments on the stack.
  
• A custom JetBrains IntelliJ IDE plugin had to be created to simplify the development process, by having an integrated entry point to the Windchill stack.

Solutions

TTPSC consultants have been designing and creating this solution to meet their needs in the development process. The joint efforts of consultants culminated in the creation of the Kubechill platform, which specializes in PLM integration and seamlessly bridges the capabilities of Windchill with Kubernetes.

It resulted in creating the Kubechill platform (name created by joining Kubernetes and Windchill together). It consists of two parts: backend pod with shell and REST interfaces and IntelliJ plugin.

The backend part has been written in Python. It allows to execute all actions needed to deploy the customization code to Windchill starting from sending the sources and ending on Windchill internal actions like XCONF propagation. Additionally, there are also actions for getting the information from Windchill, like Method Server logs. In the future, this code will be rewritten to Kotlin language to include even more features.

On the other end we have a custom plugin in the IntelliJ IDE, created with the SDK prepared by JetBrains company. This plugin is a full-fledged Graphical User Interface for interacting the Kubechill backend without leaving the IDE.

Results

Kubechill is a very handy set of tools used by the company’s Windchill developers all the time. It brings joy in interacting with Kubernetes stack and decrease the time spent on manual deployments during the local development process.

Kubechill serves as an invaluable toolkit for the company’s Windchill engineers, streamlining interactions with the Kubernetes stack and significantly cutting down on time-consuming manual deployment tasks in local product development.