Use case

Enhancing CI/CD Release 20x Faster

About the Customer

EduPro is a student management platform designed to help educational institutions streamline administrative processes, boost operational efficiency, and enhance the student experience. The platform enables schools, colleges, and universities to digitize tasks such as enrollment, scheduling, communication, and performance tracking.

EduPro allows educators to offer a seamless, contactless experience for students, personalize learning pathways, and provide additional services like online tutoring and extracurricular activities management.

Customer Challenge

The customer was facing significant challenges in their Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) pipeline, which were hindering their ability to deliver updates swiftly and efficiently.

Operating in over 60 countries with integrations into more than 70 Student Information Systems (SIS) and Learning Management Systems (LMS), EduPro’s competitive advantage relies on the speed and reliability of its software delivery processes.

The core issues included:

Prolonged Build Times: The build process for EduPro’s extensive Node.js modules took between 1.5 to 1.75 hours, causing delays and reducing the frequency of deployments.
Inefficient Deployment Process: Deployments required significant manual intervention, leading to inconsistencies, potential errors, and a slow release cycle.
High Resource Costs: The existing infrastructure was expensive to maintain, with a large portion of resources dedicated to managing the CI/CD process manually.

These issues collectively resulted in delayed feature releases, increased operational costs, and the risk of falling behind in a competitive market.

Solution

To address these challenges, IAMOPS, an expert IT operations and security service provider, implemented a comprehensive overhaul of EduPro’s CI/CD pipeline, focusing on both process optimization and infrastructure efficiency.

Solution Overview:

1. CI Process Optimization:

Automated Code Synchronization: When new code was pushed to EduPro’s Bitbucket repository, an AWS Lambda function automatically triggered a Jenkins pipeline. The code was synchronized with the Elastic File System (EFS) using rsync, ensuring smooth integration.
Streamlined Builds: Jenkins initiated an npm build within a Docker container that utilized a pre-built, lightweight Alpine-based Docker image (80MB). This approach drastically reduced build times by eliminating the need to rebuild Docker images for every code change.

2. CD Process Enhancement:

GitOps Deployment Approach: IAMOPS employed ArgoCD for managing deployments within EduPro’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster. Kubernetes manifests and Helm charts stored in Bitbucket were synchronized with the EKS cluster, ensuring consistent and reliable deployments.
Seamless Updates: Jenkins facilitated the CI process, followed by a CD process where Kubernetes deployments were automatically restarted, ensuring that all pods ran the latest code without manual intervention.

Key Integrations & Best Practices:

Jenkins and EFS Integration: Jenkins was configured with a Docker volume mounted to EFS at a specific path, ensuring efficient build processes.
EKS and Volume Mounting: The same EFS path was mounted in the EKS Kubernetes deployment, enabling seamless synchronization of code changes across the environment.
Automation: Automated testing components, including end-to-end automated tests in a sandbox environment, were integrated to ensure application integrity before production deployment.

Results and Benefits

The IAMOPS solution delivered significant improvements, driving both technical and business outcomes:

Build Time Reduction: The time required for running npm install and npm rebuild was reduced by over 90%, from 1.5-1.75 hours to just 5-7 minutes.
Faster Release Cycle: The entire release cycle, including deployment to production, was shortened from hours to just 10-12 minutes, with an 80% reduction in deployment time.
Enhanced Operational Efficiency: Automation minimized manual interventions, reduced errors, and allowed the development team to focus on innovation, leading to more frequent and reliable feature releases.
Cost Savings: Optimized CI/CD pipeline led to reduced infrastructure costs and improved resource utilization, resulting in significant cost savings.

Through this transformation, EduPro and IAMOPS recognized the value of integrating automation and streamlined processes into the CI/CD pipeline.

This case highlighted the importance of reducing manual interventions to improve speed and reliability in software delivery.

It also underscored the need for continuous evaluation of infrastructure and processes to maintain operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

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.