DevOps Implementation and Optimization

Challenges: 

Some of the major challenges of the product were the following: 

• The product was using the TFS repository system, which needed migration to any Git server. 

• There was no proper Process or Process Template across the organization, but the customer team was maintaining Work Items and User Stories in crude ways.  

• The product had no Development or DevOps policies or practices.  

• There was no proper Branching Strategy. 

• Sprint delivery took more than 4 days for deployment across 25 clients. 

• No Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment were in place. 

• CI/CD was required to do deployment across Dev, QA, and UAT environments. 

• The customer lacked automated testing (End-to-End Testing as well as Functional Testing). 

Solution:

• A detailed discovery phase was done, and a common Process Template was designed. 

• The Tech stack for the CICD (GitLab and Jenkins) process was discussed and finalized. 

• DevOps team planned and successfully migrated from TFS to GitLab. 

• Naming convention, versioning, and tagging process for branches and folder structure were implemented across all product repositories. 

• Branching strategies and policies were created and implemented across all the repositories. 

• The DevOps team recommended the implementation of RBAC policies at the Project level. 

• The team designed the flow for the CI/CD process and implemented the same. 

• DevOps team integrated the Automated Testing Scripts.  

• DevOps Team created CI/CD flow for production, which made the Implementation Team capable to deploy straight into production with just a few clicks.  

Outcome:  

• When the DevOps team started the discovery phase, they were at a maturity level of 0 (As per AWS DevOps Maturity Scale.) Now the team has reached a Maturity Level of 4+. 

• Previously the Development Team needed to carry out a lot of manual processes, which are now automated and the TL just needs to approve the PRs. 

•  Previously someone had to manually build the repositories and test in the fixed Dev/QA/UAT environments, now environments are provisioned on the go. 

• Manually running the testing scripts and sharing the test reports had been just a misuse of resources, now this process is integrated into the Jenkins Pipelines. 

• The same was with the Deployment team, which took more than one working week for entire client deployments. Now it can be done within one and a half days. 

• As per the DevOps team, this deployment time was also on the higher end. We did further tuning and were able to bring down the deployment time to 8 hrs.