Synopsis:
To gain an edge over the competition, organizations today need to keep up with the velocity of technological change. DevOps adoption can certainly help in reaching the needed agility. However, measuring and understanding the current state baseline is critical and that is why the client, a leading technology provider in air transport industry, approached us. Our solution provided clear visibility to the client along with enhanced productivity and improved baseline performance.
About the Client:
Eurostar is one of the high-speed train service provider linking the UK to the European continent and have been since 1994. Since then, Eurostar has carried over 130 million passengers. The client transports 10 million passengers a year between London, Paris, Brussels, Lille, Lyon, and Marseilles.
Business Challenge:
Eurostar has always been at the cutting edge of innovation in industry and respond to the unpredictability (such as COVID-19 pandemic) in much smoother way with great user experience.
Responding to unpredictability became challenging, especially when conventional technology (Legacy Infrastructure and Manual build & releases) was not designed to handle such unprecedented changes in passenger demand and requirements.
The client had clear vision to transform its operations through improvements to their fleet, services, and stations. They wanted to bring in agility and scalability to their business operations and to lower TCO in IT infrastructure. The client, hence, decided to migrate their backend and critical applications to AWS cloud and reducing the development and release cycle.
Our Solution:
- Infrastructure as a Code: All the services were launched using CloudFormation scripts in order to ensure that the ‘code of stacks’ of services is version-controlled via GitHub.
- CI-CD: Non-native complete CI-CD pipeline was implemented using Jenkins. Workflow was created for EC2 provisioning and Ansible was used for automating, installing, and configuring an AWS EC2 instance. Jenkins integrated with a Git repository allows for automatic triggering of code builds and deployment on git pushes, branches, and pull requests
- Agile Approach: Agile practices were adopted and an agile team with iterative and collaborative approach was deployed for the project to be delivered within five months. Key applications and their dependencies were identified, and more than 50 key services were spread for setup, deploy on Cloud using IaC, and cutover over seven sprints, each lasting three weeks
- Monitor and Secure: Cloud tools (AlertLogic,datadog,cloudcheckr) were planned and implemented as part of CI/CD, ensuring all aspects of security were covered as per the client’s security policy. An entirely new alert management process was proposed, created, and implemented to ensure that the cloud infrastructure was utilized to its full potential
Outcome:
- Our solution provided an agile, scalable, and secure platform for Client’s growing business
- In AWS, development environment set-up/provision time has drastically reduced with built-in security features
- Faster release cycles times for client teams
- New AWS infrastructure with DevOps methodology support client’s ambitious growth plans and innovations driving great experience for millions of travelers
