End to End CI/CD for Microservices

Challenge

Portal is an innovative digital video sharing platform that changes how content creators earn money from their content. Being a startup, Portal wanted to make sure its engineers are able to focus on building the right user experience for their customers on top of a foundation that can scale to meet the needs of its engineers and customers. The ask was to build end to end automation for multiple microservices using AWS services and a CI/CD pipeline that allows developers to build and deploy their services.

Portal partnered with rearc to design a microservices based approach using the 12-factor app principles. The services run on top of AWS ECS, leverage RDS PostgreSQL as it’s backend persistent data store and S3 as a static image store. AWS Cloudfront is used a CDN for global caching and delivery of assets.

Solution

We designed a CI/CD pipeline using AWS CodeBuild & CodePipeline to build docker images for each microservice, run tests, run database migration scripts and deploy to ECS. Cloudwatch Metrics, Logs and Dashboards were used for monitoring, alarming and visibility of all services.

Outcome

• A microservices architecture that allows independent scaling and growth of services
• A CI/CD pipeline that simplifies the developer workflow so that they can focus on business logic and customer experience
• An effective monitoring and alerting strategy
• End to end automation template in version control