CI/CD Automation & Managed Services For An Analytics Platform On AWS Cloud

Published on:10 Jun 2023

About the client

An India-based strategic consulting, technology and analytics company for the global sports ecosystem. SportsMechanics helps sports bodies, athletes, teams, brands, broadcasters, and media achieve better outcomes and finally deliver the best-in-class experience for the fans through the stakeholders in the value chain. With over a decade of deep domain expertise and competence in consulting, technology and analytics across disciplines, they have mastered the art of binding the distinct technologies in the world of sports, which has resulted in creating epic results for their clients.
Industry:
Technology
Location:
India

Challenge

The customer’s core (business-critical) analytics application includes a real-time (live) sporting-event tracking and updating platform hosted on AWS. With multiple (internal and contractor) teams managing application development and production management, the customer was using an SVN-based code repository used by the (external contractor) Development team. The production deployment on cloud was then undertaken by internal teams. The entire deployment process and approach lacked resilience.

The key challenges were:

  • Code and version management across environments
  • No downtime for live sporting event tracking
  • The application IP was highly confidential and valuable and managing access and security across environments and teams
  • Handoffs across multiple teams resulted in production delays, errors and rollbacks

Solution

Cloud Kinetics conducted a detailed assessment to understand the current methodology and proposed a workflow that leverages AWS services. Cloud Kinetics recommended and implemented a solution that uses AWS Code Commit & Code Deploy with a manual approval process considering the need to have a case-to-case review of the deployments for Security and Budget reasons. A plan for implementing an automated approval process was also provided for future enhancements. This CI/CD approach was implemented across all environments namely TEST, STAGE & PRODUCTION. As part of the Resilience strategy, the production workloads were deployed in multiple AZs, ensuring high availability.

The Cloud Kinetics team also provides continuous support and monitoring through 24/7 Managed Services for AWS. Powered by ArcusTM, Cloud Kinetics’ intelligent multi-cloud management platform, this ensures smooth and efficient infrastructure operation through comprehensive monitoring, support, and optimization. Additionally, a unified view of the customer’s overall cloud spend empowers them to effectively track costs.

Success Metrics

  • On a single (Production) environment, 50% average reduction in deployment and G-Live time was observed and reported by customer.
  • After steady-state, 9 out of 10 deployments were consistent across environments (~90% reduction in unforced human errors)
  • Access control to cloud (AWS) environment was better managed.
  • Predictable costs of infrastructure and DevOps tools
  • Automated Health Monitoring with Code Deploy and proactive actions
  • Quick recovery from deployment failures and improved service continuity with rollback functionality
  • Leveraged AWS’s region-level SLA of 99.99%
Tags: Amazon Web Services (AWS) Automation Cloud Applications Cloud Managed Services Cloud Operations (CloudOps) DevOps Digital Platforms Information Technology (IT) Services Retail & Ecommerce