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Cloud co-development leads to end-to-end automated delivery pipeline

A loan software company hired a trusted AWS partner for enterprises. The goal was to build a better software delivery pipeline, which would allow them to get more value to their customers faster.

case study setup
Situation

Migrating to the cloud

 

 

A Loan Software Company was undergoing a migration from an on-premise data center to Google Cloud Platform to improve scalability, resiliency, and cost savings. To migrate their applications to GCP with the least amount of impact, containerizing the applications made the most sense. This strategy, however, demands automation to create and deploy the containers, so they asked Sketch to help build a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.

Challenge

Lacking a CI/CD pipeline

case study challenge

To migrate, our client needed each of their applications configured, rebuilt, pulled into a pipeline, and then deployed to the cloud. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a team with enough experience to do the development work.

Automated pipeline goals

Most importantly, they needed an automated pipeline that could do all of the following:

 

  • Access the source code of a Java SpringBoot application
  • Compile the application and initiate automated tests with Gradle
  • Create a container image capable of running the application
  • Deploy the container into Kubernetes using Spinnaker
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This would entail modernizing the entire software delivery function.

Enter Sketch

Solution

Automated DevOps pipeline

Sketch brought in one of our senior cloud engineers to take on the challenge.

case study solution

The client wanted the pipeline to be established first, so their development teams could start leveraging the automation as soon as possible.

DevOps goals

Sketch started building the pipeline, which included the following plan:

  • Use GitHub, Jenkins, Docker/Kaniko, and Kubernetes (common enterprise DevOps tools)
  • Use Helm along with Spinnaker for deployment
  • Implement SonarQube to ensure higher code quality, application stability, and security
  • Add a service mesh tool called "Istio" to FNI's environment to offer monitoring, logging, tracing (debugging), and complex routing, all without the need to modify any application code
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Cloud co-development

The client also wanted Sketch to pair with their own employees during the creation of this pipeline. In doing so, they could facilitate knowledge sharing throughout the entire process.
Through this collaborative effort, Sketch and the client chose the simplest of applications to use as the guinea pig, proving the success of each stage of the pipeline as it went from build to test to package to deploy.
case study results
Results

Successful pipeline delivered early

DevOps pipeline established

After watching the app go through various phases, our client knew the pipeline was complete (an iteration earlier than our originally scoped end date). 

Technologies used

JavaGradleGithub EnterpriseJenkinsKubernetesDocker/ KanikoHelmSpinnakerIstio Google Cloud Storage and Google Container Registry

CLIENT FEEDBACK

“Sketch was a pleasure to work with and tackled every challenge we sent their way. I really hope we can take the skills we learned and get the other teams to practice them as well. Lots of good knowledge transfer, and success along the way. Can’t get much better than that.”

Director of development

FinTech company

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