Automated CI/CD

Challenge

M. Shanken, a communications company producing content related to wine, whiskey, and cigars, has been deploying their applications through AWS OpsWorks using a variety of infrastructure tools that were pieced together on an application-by-application basis. This solution was time consuming and not cost effective. Additionally, it was taking valuable development time away from engineers, who had to learn how to use these different features and tools to deploy their applications. Importantly, there was no automation and hence no repeatability with their cloud infrastructure management.

We partnered with M.Shanken to build a comprehensive solution, including everything from infrastructure as code to a deployment environment.

Solution

• We created a simple Terraform module library, providing the team with reusable code pieces needed to quickly and efficiently write infrastructure code to meet each application’s needs.
• Most of the applications had standard requirements, so we moved to a simpler, more out-of-the-box solution, utilizing AWS managed services such as CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and ECS.

Outcome

We created a streamlined, push-button experience, where developers could run one “terraform apply” command for their application, and the project would be fully built, tested and deployed onto AWS.

• Developers now have the ability to deploy code with agility and confidence
• Fully automated CI/CD process includes unit and end-to-end testing of applications prior to deployment
• Deployments are faster and much more frequent without sacrificing developer productivity
• ECR solution for docker image storage to avoid duplicate images to ensure only successfully tested images are deployed