DevOps Enabler

Description: A Fintech product Company focused on Compliance & Business Process Management solutions to the Credit & Collections Industry, offering a wide range of products. DevOps Enabler & Co. was provided with the opportunity to implement DevOps on one of their most complicated product. Challenges: Some of the major challenges of the product were the following: The product was using the TFS repository system, which needed migration to any Git server. There was no proper Process or Process Template across the organization, but the customer team was maintaining Work Items and User Stories in crude ways. The product had no Development or DevOps policies or practices. There was no proper Branching Strategy. Sprint delivery took more than 4 days for deployment across 25 clients. No Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment were in place. CI/CD was required to do deployment across Dev, QA, and UAT environments. The customer lacked automated testing (End-to-End Testing as well as Functional Testing). Solution: A detailed discovery phase was done, and a common Process Template was designed. The Tech stack for the CICD (GitLab and Jenkins) process was discussed and finalized. DevOps team planned and successfully migrated from TFS to GitLab. Naming convention, versioning, and tagging process for branches and folder structure were implemented across all product repositories. Branching strategies and policies were created and implemented across all the repositories. The DevOps team recommended the implementation of RBAC policies at the Project level. The team designed the flow for the CI/CD process and implemented the same. DevOps team integrated the Automated Testing Scripts. DevOps Team created CI/CD flow for production, which made the Implementation Team capable to deploy straight into production with just a few clicks. Outcome: When the DevOps team started the discovery phase, they were at a maturity level of 0 (As per AWS DevOps Maturity Scale.) Now the team has reached a Maturity Level of 4+. Previously the Development Team needed to carry out a lot of manual processes, which are now automated and the TL just needs to approve the PRs. Previously someone had to manually build the repositories and test in the fixed Dev/QA/UAT environments, now environments are provisioned on the go. Manually running the testing scripts and sharing the test reports had been just a misuse of resources, now this process is integrated into the Jenkins Pipelines. The same was with the Deployment team, which took more than one working week for entire client deployments. Now it can be done within one and a half days. As per the DevOps team, this deployment time was also on the higher end. We did further tuning and were able to bring down the deployment time to 8 hrs.