About the client
Industry:Media & Entertainment
Location:India
Challenge
The Customer’s OTT platform had multiple complexities.
- A large variety of applications (games) on the platform, and therefore, multiple application vendors
- High Availability was mandatory, this was revenue-generating platform
- Very high frequency of updates to applications
- Manual deployment was resource-intensive and time-delayed.
- Speed of deployment was a key requirement
Solution
CK cloud infrastructure architects were involved during the initial phase of the project implementation and had a detailed assessment to understand the methodology and proposed a workflow that leverages AWS services.
Infrastructure – CK proposed the use of Autoscaling with the help of Application Load Balancers to separate the different games in the Web layer. Also proposed to have the RDS with the multiple replicas to handle the sudden high concurrency user hits.
Deployment – CK proposed the use of the AWS CodeCommit/Code Deploy with the help of CodePipeline taking into consideration the Security and Budget deliverables. This CI/CD approach was implemented across all environments namely, STAGE & PRODUCTION.
Security – Per CK’s recommendation the applicable AWS services are encrypted at Rest and at Transit.
- Smooth transition to the new CI/CD approach and training for the developers
- Eliminates manual deployment of code
- Approval process was put in place to authorize least privilege access to the Developers
Success Metrics
- ~3x reduction in time taken for setting up of additional pipelines
- >75% reduction in deployment time owing to automation of CI/CD approach
- ~ 90% reduction in errors during deployments
- Simplified code deployments across all environments
- Enhanced security with encryption, access control and encryption
Lessons Learned:
Testing Rigor: CK was familiar with the client’s business and infrastructure teams for 6 years, and therefore understood that the project time was a constraint. In the interest of getting the CI/CD platform into production in an accelerated manner, enough testing of each application’s CI/CD requirements was not performed. While the customer’s business teams were constrained, this resulted in more rework and issue-fixing for some applications. The lesson learned is an age-old lesson: more applicable in automated environment: rigorous testing and error traps.
