Client

Public sector client(uk)

Project Information

Topic: Infrastructure as Code for building environments

Technology: AWS Services, Terraform and Ansible

Challenges

• Un-planned maintenance.
• Deployments are manual and risk of human error when installing packages and installations are un-managed in non-repeatable manner.
• Deployment process is difficult and hard to pinpoint failures, difficult to roll back to a known state and it takes long time to deploy new components.

The Solution

The solution is based on Hashicorp’s reference architecture for AWS. AWS Modules are used to build:

• VPC And Its Subnets, Route Tables And Internet Gateway
• NAT Instances And Elastic Ips.
• EC2 Instances And Databases For Compute And Storage.

Tools Used:

• Git – SCM Repository
• Jenkins – Orchestrator
• Terraform – Infrastructure Build
• Ansible – Configuration Management And Software Deployment
• AWS Services & CLI.

The below architecture explains how the resources are build and configured in AWS using open source available tools.

The solutions steps are described as below:

• Engineers Develops Terraform Modules, Jenkinsfile And Ansible Playbooks Using Their Local System.
• Code Is Checked-In And Committed In A Private Git Repository. And Trigger To Jenkins Is Initiated Using Webhooks.
• Jenkins Triggers The Pipeline Which Execute The Stages For Downloading Code On Terraform Server And Initiating The Build On AWS.
• Terraform Build AWS Services And Updates The Details In Ansible Host To Deploy Software Library.
• Ansible Trigger The Build And Configures The Environment As Per Playbooks And Smoke The System For Availability.

Results And Benefits

• No Planned Downtime Required For Maintenance.
• Deployments Will Be Automated TO ENSURE Risk Of Human Error Is Removed When Installing Packages And To Ensure Installations Are Managed In A Consistent And Repeatable Manne.
• Easily Roll Back To A Known State And Quicker And Reliable Deployment Of Any New/Existing Components.
• Average Cost Reduced To One-Third Of Actual Resulting In Savings And Best Use Of Human Resources.
• In The First Month Of Operation No Major Incidents Occurred, And An Uptime Of Nearly 100% Was Achieved.