Devops implementation for a leading education company
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The document outlines a DevOps implementation for a leading education company aimed at enhancing their application delivery by replacing inefficient testing methods and server management. The proposed solution includes setting up a build flow plugin for optimizing test execution, implementing an ELK stack for real-time log monitoring, and utilizing SonarQube for continuous code inspection. As a result, the customer improved product efficiency by 60% and gained the ability to scale their operations effectively with modern DevOps practices.
Devops implementation for a leading education company
- 1. ATTENTION. ALWAYS. DevOps Implementation for a Leading Education Company
- 2. THE CUSTOMER THE CHALLENGE The customer offers assessment tools and other educational content in all available media to cater to their diverse audience. Earlier, they were adopting the traditional method of product development that often resulted in process delays and performance issues during the deployment part. The customer is one of the world’s leading education companies that develop academic and research content over a wide spectrum of subjects including business, technology, science, law and humanities. They are committed to provide carefully-crafted learning tools and they are also one of the foremost publishers in the school segment (from primary to senior secondary) with book lists in English Language Teaching (ELT), sciences, mathematics etc.
- 3. The existing testing method allows FitNesse execution (an automation testing application that allows any user to enter formatted input and creates tests for the system to execute) to follow a sequential manner of execution. This is an inefficient process that causes time delays when executing all the triggered jobs. Test reports couldn’t be generated by command line execution which forced the test analysis to be done in a time- consuming manner in the main FitNesse server. As the customer was maintaining a lot of servers across the globe, they wanted an active log monitoring routine on system-related activities. In short, the customer required a fully matured DevOps implementation that would enhance their overall application delivery. Aspire’s team proposed setting up a build flow plugin to take care of the order of jobs execution. THE SOLUTION In order to optimize the test execution time of multiple tests in FitNesse server, Aspire’s team proposed setting up a build flow plugin to take care of the order of jobs execution. This order in the plugin is done as per the requirement in a specific order by simply ignoring the results of the executed jobs. The plugin is also designed to generate test reports simultaneously as the jobs get executed and the test report page was also made available in Jenkins fitnesse results page. FitNesse Jobs Execution Aspire’s team offered to implement DevOps into the customer’s project delivery system by executing three major implementations in their environment. TECHNICAL CHALLENGES
- 4. This method replaces the need for 5 FitNesse servers with just one, thereby increasing the time and cost efficiency. Reusable test scripts are used and a new FitNesse server can be setup instantly by launching multiple instances on the same server. Key Features For continuous code inspection, Aspire’s team utilized SonarQube managed inside containers by Docker and AWS ECS (EC2 Container Service) and ECR (EC2 Container Registry) and the rest of the activities were automated by Ansible. The configuration of SonarQube, with MySQL as the database, is done by Ansible by triggering the installation of ECS and fetching the respective images from ECR. This means that the customer can have multiple instances of SonarQube instantaneously with several versions in it. Sonar dashboards would allow viewing of codes of the project that were configured with Sonar. Sonar and ECS Management Ansible EC2 Container Service EC2 Container RegistryDocker Images Virtual Machines
- 5. In order to manage multiple servers across geographies, Aspire’s team proposed the implementation of an ELK stack (consisting of Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana), with an additional front end interface of Grafana, to acquire real-time instant reports with different types of graphs and time- stamps. The ELK stack provides a SAR log monitoring system, with feature to search all the logs at one place, which will come in handy to identify problems and correlating logs with the servers or applications. Kibana will be useful for administration-related activities while Elasticsearch will restore the logs from Logstash and directs it to processing in Grafana. SAR Log Monitoring Scalability can be achieved at ease with the help of Elasticsearch as it is built to scale horizontally out-of-the-box. When the customer requires more capacity, all they have to do is add another node and let the cluster reorganize itself. Elasticsearch utilizes Lucene, a high-performance text search engine library, to enable search with multi-language support, an extensive query language, geolocation support, context- sensitive suggestions and auto completion. Elasticsearch also allows the customer to store complex, real- world entities as structured JSON documents with a default index for all fields that enable the user to achieve a precise result within seconds. Key Features Fliebeat Server 1 Server 2Fliebeat Kibana Dashboard ELK STACK / LOGSTASH SERVER Grafana Dashboard Reverse Proxy Store Logs Process and Index logs from S3 Niginx Elastic Search Logstash Mounting respective S3 bucket Amazon S3
- 6. Cloud Management AWS and Rightscale Continuous Integration Jenkins Build Tools Ant Scripting Languages bash, python Log Management Elasticsearch, Logstash, Filebeat, Kibana, Grafana and Nginx ECS Management Ansible, SonarQube, MySQL, Docker, ECS and ECR THE BENEFITS Aspire’s efforts in creating a complete DevOps implementation plan by using the latest tools and methods allowed the customer to improve their product efficiency by 60%. The ELK stack gives the customer the power of real-time data insights and analytics along with the ability to perform super- fast data extraction from virtually all structured and un- structured data sources. FUTURE IMPACT Aspire’s systematic, modern approach to containerization helped the customer to transform the way their project adopted DevOps practices and will enable them to scale with exponential efficiency.