GROOTS CLOUDS SUCCESS STORY
Bigfish - Scaling CI/CD pipeline to support rapid growth using AWS EKS
CloudOps | Gmetrics | Logviu | CloudNetra
Industry
Information Technology
Location
Pune
Featured Services
CloudOps, Migration, Devops, Continuous Monitoring.
Benefits Summary
- Plan& Build
- Migration on AWS EKS
- Build pipeline at Gitlab
- Improved & speedy continuous deployment
- Continuous monitoring for AWS infra, EKS, asset discovery & cost analysis
- Saved 25% AWS monthly cost
- Improved under utilised resources
Bigfish Case Study
About BigFish
Bigfish provides employee engagement software to multiple organisation. The startup aims to increase customers productivity by providing employee engagement solutions that are reliable and convenient.
A tool to change the dialogue between the maker and manager in every organisation to achieve greater results by keeping employees inspired.
Opportunity
Bigfish set to work redesigning its architecture on AWS to be container based and feature both an automated, standardized pipeline and a dedicated test environment.
The company had been using AWS since its beginning, and it knew that AWS was the right foundation for its new architecture as well as more secure as per their application security compliances.
“We wanted to use the full power of AWS EKS to do all the hard work for us,” says Abhijeet, CTO at Bigfish. “EKS was an easy choice and continued to be great.”
BigFish leveraged several Amazon Web Services-
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon ALB
- Amazon WAF, Cloudfront
- Amazon VPC
- Amazon S3
- Amazon application & database migration
- AWS cost monitoring & optimization
Groots included value added third party tool for automation & monitoring
- Cloudformation – An infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool that allows Bigfish to create, and manipulate its AWS infrastructure.
- CloudWatch & Gmetrics – AWS Infra, application performance monitoring, SSL expiry, domain expiry monitoring.
- Logviu – EKS, RDS & application log analysis over hosted ELK.
- CloudNetra – Cost explorer & asset inventory.
Groots CloudOps solution architect for Bigfish application
- Groots proposed a scalable and highly-available architecture using AWS EKS for web & mobile application.
- Groots incorporated many thing like, Setup AWS EKS cluster, RDS integration, VPC peering, cloud infra automation by cloud-formation to established dedicated test environment. With the integration with Gitlab CI/CD feature for application (micro-services) deployment
- High Availability – Multiple availability zones and backup/restore strategies provided maximum resilience to server failure.
- Enhanced database performance – Database tuning, replication, logging and encryption services improved performance.
Bigfish built a “super pipeline”: a CI/CD pipeline that standardised and automated the deployment process across teams and projects. It achieved its new micro-services-based architecture using Amazon EKS in 2022 and completed the super pipeline using AWS.
Bigfish uses GitLab for its DevOps workloads and hosts it on EC2, which provides secure and resizable compute capacity to support virtually any workload. When it’s saving changes to a repository, the company uses an operator in Amazon EKS to pull the repository and apply the proper deployment configuration.
In that way, the company can track who made changes and when. Bigfish hosts all its Docker artifacts in Gitlab registery, a fully managed container registry for storing, sharing, and deploying container software.
When needed, the company can use Amazon EKS to retrieve the docker image so that it can roll back deployments and code changes without affecting the production environment. If we need to roll back, we can just use the pipeline to pull a stable version and deploy it.
At the same time, gitlab CI/CD used for situations when minor or patch versions need to be deployed quickly in a rolling fashion and with roll-back capabilities.
With this container-based approach, Bigfish can test ideas in a non-production environment without interrupting the compute layer of its architecture and trace any issues in deployment.
The bottom line
To achieve this, the company built a CI/CD pipeline on Gitlab. It used a suite of AWS services, including Amazon EKS & was able to migrate from EC2 on demand to EKS cluster, without any side effects or more downtime in the process. All component & micro services have been successfully deployed & validated allowing Bigfish to effortlessly continue with their platform development on EKS.
In 2022, as it was building the new super pipeline with AWS EKS.
“Our teams aren’t worried about building the pipelines anymore because we can standardize everything on AWS and instead of worrying about infrastructure, engineers get to focus on building the best products possible.” – Say Abhijeet
