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Pulsebyte Case Study - CICD Pipeline

Project Context

This case study showcases how implementing DevOps practices and utilizing optimized tools facilitated the transition from manual processes to automated CI/CD pipelines, resulting in significant improvements in efficiency, reliability and cost-effectiveness for federal agencies.

Challenge

Federal agencies dealing with outdated technologies and legacy systems encountered major obstacles in updating their infrastructure. Manual processes for deployment, testing, and operations were time-consuming, creating bottlenecks that led to delays, decreased reliability, and increased technical debt. The need to shift to automated DevOps practices to enhance productivity, governance, and the delivery of quality digital services to citizens became evident.


Siloed Workflow: Development, QA, and Operations teams operated in isolation, resulting in communication gaps and slower development cycles.


Manual Deployment: The deployment process was manual, prone to errors, and time-consuming, leading to frequent downtimes and delays.


Lack of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): The absence of automated CI/CD pipelines slowed down release cycles and impeded the ability to respond swiftly to market demands.


Inconsistent Environments: Development, testing, and production environments were different, causing issues during the deployment and testing phases.

Solution

Automation with CI/CD: Utilizing CI/CD pipelines through tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, and CircleCI to automate the processes of building, testing, and deploying.


Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Employing tools like Terraform and Ansible to manage infrastructure, ensuring consistency across various environments.

Continuous Monitoring and Feedback: Using tools like Prometheus and NewRelic to monitor application performance and collect feedback for ongoing enhancement.


Containerization with Docker and Orchestration with Kubernetes: Using Docker to containerize applications for consistency and deploying them at scale with Kubernetes for improved resource management and utilization.

Auto-scaling: Enables systems to dynamically adjust resources based on demand, optimizing resource usage to scale up during peak loads and scale down during low demand periods.


New Environment Spin-up: Rapidly creating new environments is essential for development, testing, and deployment. Automation aids in the swift creation of consistent environments, reducing manual errors and saving time. Automation in disaster recovery environments ensures quicker and more reliable recovery processes.


Standardization and unified process:  Achieved higher levels of build, unit test, code quality, and security standards across numerous component builds through standardization and process unification across projects.

Key Results & Positive Outcomes

Accelerated Release Cycles: Implementing DevOps shortened the release cycle from months to weeks or even days, enabling faster feature delivery.

Enhanced Stability and Reliability: Automation and standardized environments decreased production issues and enhanced system stability.

Improved Collaboration: Cross-functional teams improved collaboration among development, operations, and QA, promoting shared responsibility.

Cost Reduction: Efficient resource use through containerization and automation led to cost savings.


Higher Customer Satisfaction: Quicker deployment of new features and fewer bugs increased customer satisfaction and retention.


U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Cloud Migration:

  1. Leveraged CI/CD pipelines to migrate numerous legacy systems to AWS cloud under tight deadlines.

  2. Infrastructure-as-code enabled self-service provisioning and standardized deployments, boosting release speed five-fold.

  3. Achieved over 100 critical agriculture application migrations within budget and on time.

  4. Reduced migration time by 40%, cut costs by 30%, and achieved $4.2 million in cost reductions by year 2 through efficient provisioning.

 

Unified Case Management Platform Improvement:


  1. Rigorous CI/CD pipelines standardized and accelerated build, test, deployment, and release processes.

  2. Automated testing caught defects early, reducing lead times between major releases by 45%.

  3. Reduced incident resolution time by 30% and deployment rollback rates by 60%, projecting $3 million in cost savings over 5 years.

  4. Advance Provider Screening Platform Improvement:

  5. IaaC implementation halved maintenance time and resource requirements.

  6. Boosted build and release times by 50% and ensured complete security by integrating security into the CI/CD workflow.

  7. Reduced yearly infrastructure costs by 52% since migrating to AWS (Reserved Instances and Savings Plans).

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