Speeding up Application Development with DevOps and AWS

Case study at a glance

The Challenge

Assisting a global airline company to build applications faster with improved availability
Solution engineering and testing of a Hybrid Cloud programme

The Solution

Ensuring connectivity between AWS hosted components and other cloud hosted applications
Guaranteeing solution components can be redeployed to other hosting platforms
Creation of test strategies and plans
Test Automation of AWS infrastructure as well as security testing

The Benefit

Resilient cloud infrastructure platform
Collaborative and agile framework
Uncompromised quality of the platform thanks to testing

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The Challenge

A global airline company needed to build applications faster with improved application availability, initiated a programme to build a new application hosting infrastructure. The new infrastructure consists of a Hybrid Cloud solution with applications hosted across AWS, Microsoft Azure and on-premise data centres. A DevOps pipeline was also be built to deploy applications faster and more reliably to the new platform. This pipeline was constructed using a number of industry tools and services to accelerate the airline group’s application deployment.

The Solution

Automation Consultants (AC) was asked to assist with the solution engineering and testing aspects of the Hybrid Cloud programme. Initially, AC performed the integration and testing of AWS, Atlassian Jira and Gitlab components due to our specialist knowledge in these areas. After proving our expertise, our involvement was extended to the configuration of other tools including Ansible, PING, Gitlab, SonarCube and Artifactory.

The engineering work we performed included:

Ensuring connectivity between AWS hosted components (E.g. Ping Identity, Artifactory) and other cloud hosted applications such as Jira, Confluence and Gitlab.

Automated provisioning of users and projects in Jira, Confluence, Gitlab and Artifactory using Ansible.

Deployment of the Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) with advice on best practice and security configuration.

Deployment and configuration of the Identity and Access Management system (PING).

Ensuring that the solution components can be redeployed to other hosting platforms such as Microsoft Azure and on-premise data centres.

The testing work on the solution included:

Creation of test strategies and plans to ensure that the Hybrid Cloud solution met customer specifications.

Set-up of Atlassian Jira as the preferred project management tool for application development with XRay being used for test management.

Test Automation of AWS infrastructure using test scripts developed and executed in GitLab.

Security testing of the both the internal and external (internet facing) solution.

The Benefits

The Global airline company has benefited from AC’s experience in deploying containerised applications to cloud hosted platforms such as AWS and building DevOps pipelines consisting of multiple tools.

Resilient cloud infrastructure platform

The company now has in place the foundations of a resilient cloud infrastructure platform capable of supporting rapid application deployment.

Collaborative and agile framework

The DevOps tools that AC helped deploy now provide a flexible, collaborative, agile framework for development teams to build applications collaboratively.

Uncompromised quality

The testing AC performed as part of the solution build ensured that quality of the Hybrid Cloud solution is not be compromised. The outcome will be an improved user experience for customers when they access the Global airline company’s applications.