Use case
Building a Scalable Lab Environment:
A Robust Setup for Load Testing
- Chirag Sharma
About the Customer
StarcommIoT is an ESIM provider organization offering seamless satellite communication solutions for IoT devices. The company delivers a robust platform for connectivity across various industries, including transportation, agriculture, and emergency services. Their services enable continuous communication in remote locations where traditional cellular networks are unavailable.
Customer Challenge
StarcommIoT needed a robust, scalable, and secure environment to test their billing application under high request loads. This environment had to accommodate multiple teams, support containerized applications, and ensure seamless integration with MongoDB Atlas and other third-party services. The critical challenge was to set up a lab environment capable of simulating high traffic to test billing behaviors, while maintaining secure access and robust monitoring.
Without addressing these challenges, StarcommIoT would risk system downtime, inaccurate billing under load, and potentially delayed deployments. They required an infrastructure that could scale effectively, perform continuous monitoring, and deliver automatic failover to ensure uninterrupted operations.
Solution
IAMOPS deployed a comprehensive infrastructure solution for StarcommIoT using GCP (Google Cloud Platform). The core components of the solution included Kubernetes for orchestrating containerized applications, MongoDB Atlas for database management, and Gitlab for CI/CD workflows.
The infrastructure included the following key setups:
- Network Infrastructure: A peered network environment was set up between StarcommIoT’s project VPCs and MongoDB Atlas VPC, with a VPN server for secure access.
- Kubernetes Deployment: GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) was configured to manage containerized applications, using an Nginx Ingress Controller for both internal and external traffic routing. This setup allowed for seamless application scaling and ensured high availability.
- Database Setup: Cloud SQL and MongoDB Atlas clusters were deployed as databases for various applications, providing high availability and automatic scaling.
- CI/CD Pipeline: Gitlab was integrated for continuous deployment, facilitating smooth, automated deployments of new code versions.
- Monitoring and Alerting: A full-stack monitoring solution using Loki, Prometheus, and Grafana was deployed to manage logs, monitor infrastructure health, and set up alerting mechanisms for automatic issue detection and resolution.
The infrastructure solution is illustrated in the diagram below:
Semantic Release Workflow
Results & Benefits
The implementation of the new infrastructure enabled StarcommIoT to perform load testing efficiently in the lab environment, ensuring their billing application is optimized for high volumes of requests. The key benefits included:
- Faster application autoscaling and high availability.
- Automatic node repairs in case of failures.
- Improved system monitoring, allowing proactive issue resolution.
- Savings of up to 60% in infrastructure costs through the use of spot instances in node pools.
About IAMOPS
IAMOPS is a full DevOps suite company that supports technology companies to achieve intense production readiness.
Our mission is to ensure that our clients’ infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines are scalable, mitigate failure points, optimize performance, ensure uptime, and minimize costs.
Our DevOps suite includes DevOps Core, NOC 24/7, FinOps, QA Automation, and DevSecOps to accelerate overall exponential growth.
As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner and Reseller, we focus on two key pillars: Professionalism by adhering to best practices and utilizing advanced technologies, and Customer Experience with responsiveness, availability, clear project management, and transparency to provide an exceptional experience for our clients.
