Source Allies saw an opportunity for our partner, a Fortune 500 agriscience company, to accelerate their digital transformation. In its current state, there were a dozen software development teams working on the same product who did not have confidence in the stability of their current cloud infrastructure and deployment environments. For example, deployment environments were maintained manually, and teams building similarly structured microservices, were not building or deploying them with any uniformity. This disjointed process sometimes caused breakdowns in communication, both in deployment and between teams.

Working together with the internal stakeholders, business units, and partner teammates, we set out to update this infrastructure and revamp the way these teams were working together. First we implemented pure infrastructure as code (IaC) cloud deployment environments, then we implemented an Request for Comments (RFC) process for generating discussion around shared build, test, and deployment tooling. This update to the infrastructure and more inclusive discussion around shared Developer Operations (DevOps) tooling before the tooling was actually built, resulted in DevOps best practices being adopted throughout the enterprise.

We also built in continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines which provide many benefits in these types of transformations. The CI/CD pipeline automated our partner’s software delivery process by building code, running tests (CI), and safely deploying a new version of the application (CD). Automated pipelines remove manual errors, provide standardized feedback loops to developers, and enable fast product iterations.

PRODUCT:

Infrastructure

We built foundational cloud IaC enabling over a dozen software development teams to deploy new web and mobile applications. This decreased setup time for deployment tools, thus saving teams weeks of work.

AWS and CI/CD

As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we leveraged our access to specific AWS product experts and our experience with IaC in order to build CI/CD pipelines in a way that enabled self-service capability for all development teams.

DevOps

By rotating embedded DevOps engineers into development teams, we further increased adoption of tooling through knowledge sharing and promoting cross-team collaboration.

TECH STACK:

• AWS (CloudFormation, Amazon Cognito, Kubernetes, and other services)
• Python
• Bash
• Salt
• Terraform
• Vault

KEY RESULTS: