Accelerating Productivity, Cost Savings, and Efficiency Gains: A Case Study
Background:
Our client, a leading OEM in the automotive industry that offers real-time in-vehicle navigation services to their customers, wanted to enhance the security of their cloud-based workloads while improving their development and operations processes. They approached Dimiour to help them implement a DevSecOps automation solution that would enable them to achieve their business objectives.
Challenges:
The client faced several challenges in their operations.
Issue reproduction in production environments by development and testing teams:
One of the significant challenges faced by the client is the difficulty in reproducing issues in production environments by the development and testing teams. Production environments are complex and dynamic, making replicating the exact conditions that led to the issue challenging. The development and testing teams may have access to different data, infrastructure, and configurations than the production environment, leading to differences in behavior.
Issues in test and production environments after each deployment:
Another challenge the client faces is problems in test and production environments after each deployment. Deployments introduce changes to the system that can cause unexpected issues, such as performance degradation, data corruption, or compatibility problems. These issues may take time to be apparent and can lead to downtime, user frustration, and revenue loss.
Recreating production environments on dev and test local systems:
Recreating production environments on development and testing local systems was another challenge. Production environments are typically more extensive and complex than development and testing environments, making it difficult to replicate the same conditions on local systems. This can lead to consistency between local and production environments, making identifying and reproducing issues difficult.
Longer cycles to manage several instances of test/dev environments:
The client also faces longer cycles to manage several instances of test and development environments. Managing multiple instances of environments requires additional resources, such as hardware, software licenses, and personnel. This can lead to more extended development and testing cycles, delaying the release of new features and bug fixes.
High infrastructure cost to meet user volume and process real-time road traffic:
The final challenge faced was the high infrastructure cost required to meet user volume and process real-time road traffic. Road traffic data can be massive and processing it in real time requires significant computing power and storage. This can be expensive to maintain, and the cost can increase as the user volume grows. Additionally, processing road traffic data requires specialized hardware and software, which can be costly to acquire and maintain.
Solution:
To solve the complex challenges of the client, Dimiour proposed the implementation of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform. By writing infrastructure as code, we created identical AWS infrastructure across all environments, including development, testing, staging, and production. This enabled the client to replicate infrastructure changes and deployments, reducing the likelihood of configuration drifts and improving infrastructure consistency quickly and easily.
In addition to IaC, Dimiour also implemented Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines using GitLab CI. With GitLab CI, Dimiour could seamlessly automate their build, quality checks, and code deployments to Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). The GitLab CI/CD pipeline provides visibility into the entire software delivery process, enabling developers to identify and address any issues that may arise quickly.
To ensure consistency across the various environments, Dimiour recommended that the version their golden Docker images and store them in GitLab’s Container Registry. This enables versioning of Docker images and simplifies the deployment process, as the images can be easily pulled from the registry and deployed to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR).
Another significant challenge that Dimiour faced was the rightsizing, reservation, and autoscaling of their infrastructure. To tackle this, we implemented AWS’s auto-scaling group and rightsizing recommendations to ensure that the infrastructure was optimized for performance and cost efficiency.
To improve the quality of their software, Dimiour recommended the automation of functional and non-functional test cases. By implementing automated testing, we significantly reduced the time required for manual testing while improving the quality of their software.
These solutions from Dimiour have enabled the client to rapidly deploy and update their infrastructure while maintaining high-quality software delivery.
Benefits:
Dimiour’s DevOps approach reduced the deployment time from hours to minutes. By leveraging advanced automation tools, Dimiour was able to streamline its deployment process, reduce the manual effort required, and minimize the risk of human error. This led to faster deployment cycles, which allowed Dimiour to deliver new features and updates to its clients quickly.
Another benefit of the DevOps approach was the minimized defect leakage. By automating the testing process and integrating it with the development process, we were able to catch and fix issues early in the development cycle, reducing the risk of defects in the final product. This led to higher-quality software and increased customer satisfaction.
The approach also significantly reduced the risk of issues. By automating the testing and deployment processes, Dimiour was able to reduce the number of manual steps involved, reducing the risk of human error. This led to more reliable and stable software, reducing the likelihood of issues and downtime.
Faster issue identification and resolution was another benefit. By leveraging advanced monitoring and alerting tools, Dimiour was able to detect issues quickly and proactively. This allowed them to resolve issues faster, reducing downtime and improving the overall reliability of the software.
There was also a 60% reduction in infrastructure hosting costs. By leveraging cloud-based infrastructure and containerization technologies, Dimiour was able to reduce its infrastructure costs significantly, leading to significant cost savings for the clients.
The QA duration across environments was reduced from weeks to days. By automating the testing process and integrating it with the development process, Dimiour was able to reduce the time required for testing across different environments. This led to faster development cycles and quicker delivery of value to clients.
Dimiour’s cutting-edge DevOps helped the client achieve their goals and deliver value to its clients quickly and efficiently.