Faster Releases and Optimized Costs for CruiseControl
CruiseControl, a crew management platform, had been stuck with centralized architecture for a while.
With a growing customer base, including Fortune 500 companies and 300,000+ concurrently active users, it became essential to revamp their infrastructure and release lifecycle.
We were engaged to rethink the deployment strategy and build a high-performance multi-environment infrastructure inside the customer’s AWS environment. Our goal was to create a solution with a high degree of automation and performance.
DevOps
AWS Regions
Auto-Scaling
CloudFormation
CI/CD
The cost of each release reduced by 92% (600 hours of dev time freed up annually)
Long-term wins for CruiseControl:
Automated deployment of the cloud infrastructure ($40,320 saved per year)
Retention & revenue growth sped up by 200% (faster feature releases)
Geo-Distributed Cloud Deployment
We started by redesigning the application cloud deployment. Spreading instances of the cloud server between multiple AWS Regions, we then enabled a latency-based routing to ensure that the requests from the ships were always served based on their location.
For maximum availability, we planned the server instances to be deployed in at least two availability zones inside each region, as a fallback in case of an incident in one of the AWS Zones.
Auto Scaling
An Auto-Scaling Policy was also implemented, based on resources consumption metrics for the cloud server. So it always has enough resources provisioned at any time and under any load. The data side was also updated to handle high load by adding queues and multi-region support.
Single-Click Deployment
CI/CD Pipelines
Inside the CloudFormation template, we defined the CI/CD pipelines for every service making up the product. These templates allowed for automated infrastructure update/deployment and seamlessly building and releasing the latest versions of the whole application to the clients. By following Gitflow strategies the developers and project managers were now able to control the multiple environments from the code level.
Shorter Release Cycle and Improved Stability
The custom solution in AWS allowed the customer to:
Sped up retention & revenue growth by accelerating new feature releases by 200%. That was a major factor in expediting an acquisition by a Fortune 500 company.
The company reduced the cost of each release by 92%, which translated into $40,320 going toward more productive non-repetitive work.
Improve the stability and reliability of Cloud Infrastructure resources.
Improve visibility into software quality which enhanced the overall developer/client experience.
Met security and compliance in the software development and release lifecycle.
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To deploy all of these changes and maintain the Development, Staging, QA, and Production environments, our solution was to create a CloudFormation template per stage to deploy and configure all of the resources. This allowed a streamlined, push-button experience, where developers could launch the stack for the desired stage, and the project would be fully built, tested, and deployed onto AWS.
This approached saved precious developing time for the engineering team that no longer needed to spin up environments to work on. Necessary network configurations were set up for the various services to communicate with each other and for the stages to be isolated from each other. The template was built such that it can be re-instantiated at will in any AWS region by specifying parameters during run-time.
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