How did you select this vendor?
The OpsWorks Co. team has passed the interview and has been selected to be our DevOps services provider.
Describe the project in detail.
OpsWorks Co. made four steps towards building a reusable and automated infrastructure:
1. Microservice Architecture Development
The main issue that caused system failures was a Docker compose file, which stored the whole 10-component application with dependencies between containers. When one component failed within one instance, all the others followed its lead.
Now each component is in a separate Docker container in a completely isolated environment. All containers operate on AWS ECS. Unlike an AWS EC2 instance, AWS ECS is a cluster that can contain hundreds of servers under the load balancer. Thus, the 10-component application migrated from the AWS EC2 to AWS elastic container service (AWS ECS).
As a result, our developers don't spend time on deploying a new version of the app manually. With AWS ECS it can be done automatically by pressing one button on the Jenkins dashboard.
2. IaC Implementation and Environment Automation
The OpsWorks Co. team developed a set of scripts that allows the system to scale up and down depending on its needs.
As a result, they automated the infrastructure deployment on AWS ECS. Now our team spends no time on creating and deploying new clusters — the scripts on Terraform and Ansible do it for them.
Implementing the IaC approach to automation made our infrastructure more flexible. Now, our team can:
- Apply a variety of coding best-practices to the infrastructure
- Validate each change to a module through code reviews and automated tests
- Create versioned releases of each module and document the changes in each release
- Try out different versions of a module in different environments
- Roll back to previous versions if there is an issue
3. CI/CD Implementation
The OpsWorks Co. team set up Jenkins and a CI/CD Pipeline to automate the routine work of software development. Now, there is no need to stop an old docker image and start a new one manually; this can be done with one button in the Jenkins dashboard.
4. Unit-testing Integration
Along with software deployment automation, they integrated unit tests in the developers' everyday work. Now, as all changes to the code make it to the production automatically, they should pass proper testing.
This is why our developers include unit tests in their code not to let a faulty feature make it to production. Unit-testing helps to avoid unexpected application failures due to new commits to the source code. They were written by our team, OpsWorks Co. integrated them into the CI/CD Pipeline.
What was the team composition?
Since OpsWorks Co. follows a team approach. The allocated team included three DevOps Engineers, along with the help from DevOps Team Lead, CTO, and a Project Manager.
Delivering excellent work, the OpsWorks Co. team is quick to respond to client requests. They stay accountable for their tasks and are willing to work beyond standard hours where necessary. If there is feedback, they're quick to implement it.