About Our Client
Our client is a leading European jewelry company.
Business Challenge
Our client needed to streamline release management and deployment processes of a custom cloud-based integration hub based on EDA and Apache Kafka, ensuring efficient and scalable operations while maintaining high standards of security and performance.
We faced several challenges and goals in the release management and deployment processes:
- Complex deployment procedures: Managing and executing deployments with minimal downtime while maintaining service availability.
- Efficient resource management: Ensuring readiness and proper configuration of resources for UAT and production environments.
- Effective monitoring and logging: Transitioning from Azure Application Insights to New Relic while maintaining comprehensive monitoring and alerting capabilities.
- Security and compliance: Adhering to stringent regulatory requirements and ensuring secure handling of sensitive data.
- Optimizing development pipelines: Integrating modern tools and frameworks for effective continuous integration and delivery.
Zoolatech Approach
ZoolaTech’s release management approach is defined by strategic use of Azure DevOps and Kubernetes, ensuring seamless deployments with minimal downtime. The process is bolstered by robust rollback mechanisms, advanced cloud infrastructure, and strict security compliance, enabling high-performance solutions with reliable data protection.
Release management process
- Strategic methodology: Utilized Azure DevOps for orchestrated deployment and monitoring. The process involved merging features and fixing branches into the main production branch, triggering automated deployment pipelines.
- Deployment strategies: Implemented Kubernetes (K8S) strategies like Rolling Updates and Recreate for minimal downtime and adaptability.
- Rigorous procedure: Ensured deployment readiness by validating Kubernetes namespaces, managing secrets, and checking pipeline logs and pod statuses.
Deployment strategy
- Comprehensive planning: Employed JIRA and Azure for task and milestone planning. Branching in Git repositories and using platforms like GitHub or Bitbucket for feature isolation.
- Development and integration: Leveraged Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions for project building and continuous integration.
- Review and merging: Conducted peer reviews and testing with robust frameworks before merging code into the main codebase, ensuring version control integrity.
Rollback strategy
- Robust mechanisms: Implemented rollback capabilities via Azure DevOps Pipelines and Helm charts. Used revert commits and database version control through Liquibase to maintain data integrity.
Cloud infrastructure
- Azure services: Utilized Azure cloud services for elastic scalability, data management, and secure hosting. Employed private endpoints, workload identities, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for environment transitions.
Monitoring, logging, and alerts
- New Relic integration: Migrated monitoring dashboards to New Relic for detailed tracing and performance insights. Integrated Open Telemetry for precise data capture and analysis.
- Alerts management: Configured alerts based on metric thresholds and associated runbooks for swift troubleshooting and resolution.
Security architecture
- Compliance and data protection: Ensured GDPR and CCPA compliance, with strict data access controls and secure management of sensitive information.
- Identity and endpoint protection: Used Azure API Management and Azure Active Directory for secure API access and credential management.
- Secure development: Integrated Snyk for continuous security scanning within the CI/CD pipeline.
Technological excellence
- Modern tools: Adopted cutting-edge technologies such as New Relic, Kubernetes, and Azure DevOps for improved performance and security.
- Event streaming and data management: Leveraged Apache
Value Delivered
- High availability: Achieved five nines (99.999%) availability for main application components, ensuring continuous service reliability.
- Cost efficiency: By introducing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), we realized cost savings over 10x greater compared to using Azure Functions. Additionally, we reduced the costs of storing metrics data by up to 7x.
- Speed and agility: Streamlined the deployment process, reducing the time from adding a change to a branch to getting it into the main branch to just 15 minutes.
- Robust security: Attained a high level of security across applications, with zero high or critical vulnerabilities detected.
- Quick rollback: Implemented a rollback strategy that allows redeployment of the previous application version in less than 1 minute, minimizing downtime and service disruption.
Overall, these improvements resulted in enhanced productivity, cost savings, and operational efficiency, positioning our client for sustained success.
