Distributed-Systems on Ole Rabanal

Modernizing a data platform for a telecom provider

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A legacy platform had grown across a dozen repositories, over sixty endpoints and more than two hundred stored procedures. Nobody held the whole picture. The work was to recover the business logic buried in it, and to replace it with something that produced the same outcomes from far fewer moving parts.

Context

A leading telecom provider, from August 2025, as architect through Sonat AS.

It is a classic pattern: an old system is given more and more responsibility over time, and grows to meet it. Business rules ended up mostly in the database, as stored procedures with no version history, no tests, and no boundary between one domain and the next. The behavior was real and the business depended on it, but it was not written down anywhere except in the implementation.

Invoice and debt collection subsystem

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A customer needed to integrate with an external debt collection service. The integration itself is not the interesting part. What a third-party vendor does to the shape of the surrounding systems, is.

Context

August to December 2024, through Sonat AS, as architect and developer.

Rather than wiring the vendor into the applications that needed it, the integration was built as a subsystem within a distributed system, consumed by other applications through events. The supported use cases:

Production lines for the ParQSense sensor and base station

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Software that builds physical products has an unusual property: the output is not a result on a screen, it is a device that leaves the building and cannot be patched afterwards.

Context

August 2018 to December 2019, at Q-Free ASA in Trondheim, in a supply chain team that owned both the hardware and the software for the production lines.

Two closely related projects, each producing one production line: one for single IoT parking sensor units, and one for the base station that multiple parking units communicate with.