Thought leadership for the transformation of DevOps practice
Black Basil provided thought leadership and transformed the DevOps and infrastructure resulting faster and seamless delivery of features
Challenge
The company built platform 1.0 and started with with UiPath and after couple years they found that they cannot scale and achieve its ambitious goals with the current platform as it lacks some important features. Some of the limitations were:
- DevOps practice was non-existent,
- All deployments were manual and there was CI/CD
- Infrastructure was not defined as code, which created problems for environment creation or account migration
- Non scalable infrastructure. All the services were running as docker containers on VM
- No-code platform is used for DevSecOps, but provisioning via this platform is manual
Solution
Black Basil provided thought leadership and contributed to the overall DevOps capability by ensuring below is done as a Solution:
- Defined the whole infrastructure as code
- Deployed on scalable infrastructure: Kubernetes
- Introduced Zero trust security
- BB provided thought leadership in DevOps and built it from scratch to ensure that the organisation emerges as an 'Elite DevOps performer' based on DORA metrics.
- Provisioned peripheral components like Kubernetes, Kafka, RDS etc. via terraform
- Built CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, infrastructure on Kubernetes, AWS using terraform.
- Ensured continuous security following SAST, DAST and static dependencies checks in the CI/CD pipelines
- Cloud Cost optimisation by following best practices
- Devised Branching strategy for complex nature if the delivery
- Implemented Monitoring, Alerts and Logging using Datadog
- Suggested tech governance strategy using Backstage
Technical Approach
- Provisioned the complete infrastructure for Platform 2.0 using Terraform
- Jenkins pipelines created for all the Platform 2.0 and 1.0 services and UI 2.0 services
- Easy and smooth deployments of workflows via Jenkins using workflow definition as configuration
- Ensuring zero trust security by implementing mTLS
- Exposed all services over HTTPS
- Datadog setup, monitoring and Dashboards
- Setup key integration components like Kafka connector between workflow and Data Lakehouse
Technologies used
Key Results
- Faster and seamless deployments resulting in smoother development and releases
- Quick infrastructure provisioning
- Better release management process
- Lower costs by 30%
- Better observability and support experience
- Highly available and scalable applications
- Enhanced security, creating more trust with client and in turn more client onboarding
- Adherence to SOC2 compliance became simpler and easier
Black Basil played a key strategic role in shaping up our new age automation platform's architecture and collaborated well with our architects, product manager, technical leads and developers ensuring the platform is designed and delivered well with the right engineering practices. They provided thought leadership in DevOps, QA Automation and Agile delivery to ensure that Element5 emerges as an 'Elite DevOps performer' based on DORA metrics. They also provided the right guidance on building our long-term data strategy by following the Data Lakehouse architecture. Their tech leadership is never hesitant even in having code pairing sessions with our developers and are always ready to roll up their sleeves whenever required
Murali Vivekanandan
Co-founder and CTO, Element5
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