Challenge
A Global airline company needed to build applications faster with improved application availability, initiated a programme to build a new application hosting infrastructure. The new infrastructure consists of a Hybrid Cloud solution with applications hosted across AWS, Microsoft Azure and on-premise data centres. A DevOps pipeline was also be built to deploy applications faster and more reliably to the new platform. This pipeline was constructed using a number of industry tools and services to accelerate the airline group’s application deployment.
Solution
Automation Consultants (AC) was asked to assist with the solution engineering and testing aspects of the Hybrid Cloud programme. Initially, AC performed the integration and testing of AWS, Atlassian Jira and Gitlab components due to our specialist knowledge in these areas. After proving our expertise, our involvement was extended to the configuration of other tools including Ansible, PING, Gitlab, SonarCube and Artifactory.
The engineering work we performed included:
- Ensuring connectivity between AWS hosted components (E.g. Ping Identity, Artifactory) and other cloud hosted applications such as Jira, Confluence and Gitlab
- Automated provisioning of users and projects in Jira, Confluence, Gitlab and Artifactory using Ansible
- Deployment and configuration of the Identity and Access Management system (PING)
- Deployment of the Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) with advice on best practice and security configuration.
- Ensuring that the solution components can be redeployed to other hosting platforms such as Microsoft Azure and on-premise data centres.
The testing work on the solution included:
- Creation of test strategies and plans to ensure that the Hybrid Cloud solution met customer specifications
- Set-up of Atlassian Jira as the preferred project management tool for application development with XRay being used for test management
- Test Automation of AWS infrastructure using test scripts developed and executed in GitLab
- Security testing of the both the internal and external (internet facing) solution
Benefits
The Global airline company has benefited from AC’s experience in deploying containerised applications to cloud hosted platforms such as AWS and building DevOps pipelines consisting of multiple tools. As a result, the company now has in place the foundations of a resilient cloud infrastructure platform capable of supporting rapid application deployment. The DevOps tools that AC helped deploy now provide a flexible, collaborative, agile framework for development teams to build applications collaboratively. In addition, the testing AC performed as part of the solution build ensured that quality of the Hybrid Cloud solution is not be compromised. The outcome will be an improved user experience for customers when they access the Global airline company’s applications.
