Our Journey — How we Adopted DevOps into our Organisation

Written by hackernoon-archives | Published 2017/01/21
Tech Story Tags: serverless-architecture | serverless | devops | big-data | cloud-computing

TLDRvia the TL;DR App

What is DevOps? What are its needs and advantages? How to use its tools for automation? How to Deploy its components?

All these were the questions in my mind when I first started scaling up my Business and started working with remote teams of different skill set and culture.

I realized the need of process and automation, to improve the productivity and collaboration.

At growth Stage, with 3+ Years of experience, delivering more than 55 projects in various domains for Startups and Enterprises including:

  • Mobility
  • Big Data
  • Internet of Things
  • Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud

Major Problems Faced By Developers & Operations Team

  • Ownership Issues during deployment
  • Fewer and Slow Releases
  • Flat Access Control and Security
  • Revision Control
  • Scaling up resources for application Stack
  • Manual processes involved in Delivery pipeline
  • Isolated Declaration of Dependencies
  • Single Configuration for Multiple Deployments
  • Manual Testing results into Slower release
  • Shared backing Services

Lean Start To Adopt DevOps

We Started transformation towards DevOps Strategy by adopting processes like Integration of DevOps Tools, Processes and Data into our work Culture. Parallely, We Started adopting different Infrastructure architectures, Building Private Cloud, Docker, Apache Mesos and Kubernetes.

Steps We taken to adopt DevOps

  • Enforcing Rules — With the help of right tools — Agile board integration with SCM, Build Tool and Deployment
  • Collaboration Tools — Rocket Chat Integration with Taiga, GitLab, Jenkins
  • Continuous Integration and Delivery
  • Explicit Dependency Management
  • Automated Testing
  • Hands on Training

We started by creating two separate teams from existing pool of developers to adopt DevOps culture for new Projects in Big Data and Mobile Applications. After Initial hurdles in adaptation to Collaboration Tools and new delivery pipeline, results came out were extraordinary.

Outcome of Initial Phase

  • Improved Performance & productivity
  • Less Manual work
  • Better Collaboration and Communication
  • Developers getting more Empowered and Involved in Delivery
  • Proper Dependency and Configuration Management

Challenges In First Phase

  • Cultural Shift in the way Things were being developed
  • Changing Mindset for Adaptation
  • Support for Legacy Environments
  • Integrating Security and Compliance on new Setup
  • No support for Overlay Networks

Overall Results

Deployed Solution in Healthcare Startup

Then we implemented this approach in our Health Care Startup RayCare where we were having multiple work flows and Big Data loads. The Technology Stack for the startup was latest and cutting edge and tall enough to leverage Microservices.

  • Stood up Development, Staging and Production Environment with almost Zero Parity.
  • Jenkins Jobs for Android, iOS, Angular and Back-end.
  • Highly Available and Distributed Cassandra Cluster.
  • Ansible Playbooks for turning up and down environment with one command.
  • Using Docker for Development and Staging Environment.

Deployed Solution in Analytics Startup

Introducing DevOps practices in an Analytics Startup with well experienced Database Administrators was altogether a great experience. The aim was to fasten data loading, database provisioning and isolating environments for a team working on 3 distinct location.

The main highlights of the implementation are:

  • Bridging gap between 3 different development location by using relevant tools to improve collaboration.
  • Writing scripts to automate the process of Data Operations as much as possible.
  • Application Delivery Pipeline of an app with multiple versions running for different clients at same time.

Deployed and collaborated with Oracle Partner for Service Now Integration & DevOps

The aim was to integrate complex Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) with Service Now, a popular IT Services Management solution for easing provisioning of Oracle based resources through Service Now. The solution provided capable of:

  • Automating Oracle DB Binaries Provisioning.
  • Running Chef Recipes from Oracle Enterprise Manager.
  • A Restful Service to trigger DB Provisioning Recipe.
  • Item listing in Service Now to trigger Restful Service on successful transaction of item.
  • Admin approval process for infrastructure process.

Deployed Solution in WebRTC based Calling Platform –Web & Mobile App

The company is fully dedicated to free calling App for mobile iOS and Android platform like iOS, Android to phone number with facility to call all around the globe.The technologies used are VMware, Couchbase, PostgreSQL, CentOS 7, Zabbix and many more

Hardware: From OVH dedicated server

Virtualization: Using Vmware bare metal

All services: on VMware Virtual Machines

The system had more than 10 NodeJS Apps, Highly Available and Distributed CouchDB Cluster which was changed to MongoDB in later stages. We made the application delivery pipeline fully automated using Ansible and Jenkins. The infrastrucutre was also made mutable using Ansible to scale up and down according to load.

Deployed Solution For Microsoft Technology Stack in Health Care Wellness

Migrating applications powered by .NET Ecosystem to DevOps powered application life cycle pipeline is a challenging job. The application was deployed on private cloud powered by OpenStack with the following features:

  • OpenStack Images for .NET Ecosystem.
  • Jenkins Jobs for Continuous Integration
  • Integration of OpenStack with Object Storage powered by Ceph.
  • Visual Studio Integration with popular DevOps Tools.

Summary

During Transformation Towards Agile & DevOps we realised that DevOps needs a platform where we can define workflow with different Integrations -

And the result which came out was NexaStack — Automate, Orchestrate and Monitor the Delivery pipeline.

For a Customized Demo Of Our DevOps Platform, just Sign Up on the website with your initial requirements and our experts will contact you shortly.


Published by HackerNoon on 2017/01/21