Implementing DevOps, Optimizing Costs
The company partnered with devopsbay to overhaul its DevOps processes, eliminate deployment bottlenecks, and reduce cloud infrastructure costs. Through automation, cost optimization, and improved security, the platform is now faster, more scalable, and easier to maintain.
- DevOps
- Infrastructure
- devops as a service
- +3DevOpsInfrastructuredevops as a service
about the project
The platform allows photographers to share beautiful photo galleries online, sell prints and products, send contracts and invoices.
The project started in an environment characterized by significant operational overhead and bottlenecks slowing down the deployment process, due to manual deployment processes to production, lack of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), or use of self-hosted CI/CD and monitoring tools, among others.
Devopsbay audited, presented and implemented an action plan, identifying key issues, automating CI/CD using GitHub Actions and GitOps (ArgoCD/FluxCD), implementing secret management, and migrating databases to DigitalOcean managed services. Measures have also been taken to reduce costs at DigitalOcean, which has already yielded tangible financial results
the challenge
The project's main challenge is to simplify and automate deployment and infrastructure management processes to reduce operational overhead and enable engineers to deliver changes themselves without direct access to environments.
technologies
Digitalocean
Kubernetes
Docker
Helm
Doppler
Argo
MongoDB
Redis
Nats
CockroachDB
Prometheus
Grafana
Results
Audit and development of transformation plan- Infrastructure management and deployment processes
- Cost Optimalization
- Streamlining the delivery flow of new service versions
Audit and development of transformation plan
devopsbay conducted a detailed audit of infrastructure, identifying key issues and areas for optimization, such as manual deployment processes, secret management or monitoring. Based on this, a comprehensive DevOps transformation plan was developed and agreed with the client, which was accepted and is now being implemented.
Infrastructure management and deployment processes
Manual deployments, secret management using Doppler was also implemented, increasing security and facilitating automation.
Cost Optimalization
Achieving measurable infrastructure cost savings Focused efforts on optimizing and adjusting Kubernetes cluster resources on DigitalOcean led to a reduction in monthly infrastructure costs of about $1,000.
Streamlining the delivery flow of new service versions
In order to meet the customer’s urgent needs for rapid testing, temporary deployment solutions have been implemented for the newly refactored service (scheduling service). This enables its rapid provisioning on environments despite ongoing work on full CI/CD pipelines. At the same time, additional manual processes requiring automation were identified and document
Audit and development of transformation plan
devopsbay conducted a detailed audit of infrastructure, identifying key issues and areas for optimization, such as manual deployment processes, secret management or monitoring. Based on this, a comprehensive DevOps transformation plan was developed and agreed with the client, which was accepted and is now being implemented.
Benefits
- 1
Reducing infrastructure costs
A reduction of about $1,000 in monthly infrastructure costs was achieved through optimization efforts, including adjusting the number and size of nodes in Kubernetes clusters on the DigitalOcean platform. This result represented about a 20% reduction on the clusters themselves and was achieved by, among other things, trimming 11 nodes on production and 2 on staging, while adding 3 memory nodes.
- 2
Automate and streamline deployment processes
IT- Infrastructure management automation has been implemented using ArgoCD, gitops, which allows software versioning to be automated. It speeds up application release cycles, reduces human error and ensures consistency and repeatability in build, test and deployment processes.
- 3
Improved security and centralized configuration
A dedicated secret management tool (Doppler) has been introduced, replacing previous practices of storing sensitive data in code (.yaml) or Kubernetes Secrets. It was introduced with tools such as Doppler or Kubernetes Secrets. Centralizing the management of secrets minimizes the risks associated with the exposure of sensitive data and facilitates auditing. The audit also identified and documented potential security vulnerabilities in the infrastructure.
- 4
Improve database management
Migrated existing databases (MongoDB, Redis, CockroachDB) running in a Kubernetes cluster to separate, stable nodes within the infrastructure, a step toward moving them to DigitalOcean's managed services. Managed databases reduce operational overhead associated with maintenance, patching or backups, and increase reliability with built-in High Availability and automatic failover.
client’s feedback
The biggest improvement in our work area was implementing automated deployment. From audit to no more manual deployment, infrastructure became way easier to work with it. In addition to the main work aimed at improving the devops system, cost optimization was a valuable bonus.
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