Executive Summary

The customer is redefining how immersive training is created and delivered. Their platform allows experts to collaborate and create training content to share with learners. The platform includes client side applications on PCs and mobile devices as well as the web.

Customer Challenges

• Feature releases required tight coordination due to limited integrated testing environments.
• Builds and deployments required development intervention to trigger and validate.
• Features that were deployed to different environments were manually tracked and were not well documented.
• Geographically distributed teams created challenges in managing the state and stability of environments.

Why the Customer Chose ThoughtSimplified

ThoughtSimplified has extensive expertise on DevOps and the software development lifecycle from innovation to operations. After discussing the challenges the customer faced we were chosen to harden and improve the quality and stability of the development and operational processes.

ThoughtSimplified's Solution

ThoughtSimplified reviewed the current development environment with the customer's development team and stakeholders and proposed the following.

Architecture Diagram

Pre-Production Environments

• Code and CI/CD pipelines managed in gitlab with specific roles to control build and deployments
• React SPA and backend services containerized and deployed to AWS EKS with an ALB to route requests
• DB persistence created for each dynamic feature environment
• All infrastructure should be defined and managed as code (IaC) in repository

Production Environment

After completing and testing pre-production cloudformation templates and CI/CD pipelines, ThoughtSimplified used these scripts as a starting place for a set of production infrastructure. The main changes are summarized by the following:

• CI/CD pipelines should be hardened for production releases
• Backend EKS worker nodes should be deployed across multiple AZs for high availability

Results and Benefits

After the process improvements the following benefits were achieved

• Improved Infrastructure Management
  • Configuration Cloudformation templates
  • Runtime Logs, Monitoring and Alarming
• Increased Development Velocity Operational tasks have been automated
• Increased Platform Stability Manual intervention has been minimized and deployed code is self documented by the environment branches and merge requests

About the Partner

ThoughtSimplified is an AWS Select Consulting Partner with a focus on DevOps and application modernization.