Automotive manufacturer accelerates CI/CD, expands automation, and boosts quality with scalable DevOps
The challenge
The manufacturer needed faster application releases and more reliable systems to support business growth in North America.
Its existing environment lacked a scalable enterprise DevOps platform. Siloed teams, long development cycles and growing technical debt slowed progress.
Manual processes and inconsistent development environments also made it difficult for application and systems teams to meet business needs.
The solution
Beyondsoft worked with the automotive manufacturer to create a standardized set of automation tools by provisioning an enterprise-scalable, hybrid-cloud DevOps platform that integrates with their existing cloud and on-premise systems. Beyondsoft onboarded more than 120 different applications.
The solution features:
- Enterprise-ready, highly available DevOps platform
- Scalable automation in the cloud
- Highly resilient, container-first strategy
- Seamless integration with their existing hybrid-cloud ecosystem
- Ability to handle any application language
- Streamlined processes and automation
- Visibility into technical debt
Notable AWS services used to complete this project include:
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS): Each of the DevOps tools (except Xray) run as an ECS task. ECS is used to manage task distribution among ECS cluster instances. It restarts any task that becomes unavailable. Tasks include: Jenkins, XL Release, SonarQube, and Artifactory.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): Several buckets are provisioned for Terraform state retention, software storage, backups, logs, and Artifactory binary storage.
Amazon DynamoDB Table: A table is created specifically for locking the Terraform state file in S3. This avoids any corruption of state during parallel Terraform execution.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) SSM Parameter Store: All secrets and necessary resource endpoints/confirmation are stored in the SSM Parameter Store. Secrets are encrypted.
Application Load Balancer: All traffic is routed through the Application Load Balancer. The listener is configured to route traffic based on if/then rules (e.g., if host is Artifactory.*, then forward to artifactory-target-group). Each target group is defined for a particular port specific to the DevOps tool, and when each ECS service is created, it is mapped to its target group for load balancing.
Amazon RDS Multi-AZ for Aurora PostgreSQL: An Aurora PostgreSQL cluster is provisioned for storing application state. Each tool creates its own databases within the RDS instance. A snapshot of the RDS instance is taken regularly for recovery purposes.
Amazon Elastic Filesystem (EFS): EFS is used to persist DevOps tool configuration data that is not stored in the database. This allows us to spin up new ECS services and tasks without loss of configuration, plugins, etc.
Results and benefits
The scalable enterprise DevOps platform has enabled:
- A consistent platform across teams.
- Automation of previously manual processes.
- Faster, more reliable innovation.
- Better collaboration between application and systems teams.
- A stronger foundation for continued business growth.
Benefits include:
- Enterprise scalability for business growth
- Highly available, self-healing systems
- Faster, more efficient release cycles
- Increased code quality and reliability
- Task automation
- Greater efficiency and productivity
- Frictionless collaboration between teams
- Fail-fast environment
- Amplified feedback loops via CI/CD pipelines
Technologies used
Amazon ECS, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB Table, EC2 SSM Parameter Store, Application Load Balancer, Amazon RDS Multi-AZ for Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon EFS
Our expertise
As an AWS DevOps Competency Partner, Beyondsoft has invested in building deep DevOps proficiency on the AWS platform. Our certified practitioners combine agile AWS tools, best practices, and methodologies along with our BCI DevOps enablement framework to establish an enterprise-scalable CI/CD platform with automated practices to expedite innovation and meet your business objectives.
To learn more, contact us today.