Law of the Jungle: Applying modern DevOps concepts in AWS

About Law of  the Jungle

Law of the Jungle (LOTJ) is a cloud-based solution for risk-proofing marketing and making compliance agile and effortless. Their solution encourages effective compliance by improving productivity and reducing time to market. LOTJ brings agile methodologies to marketing teams and guides them through compliance using artificial intelligence on AWS.

The vision behind LOTJ is to allow its clients to turn marketing compliance into a competitive advantage.

The Business Challenge

Law of the Jungle was already running workloads in AWS, however they experienced challenges with configuration management and complex deployments. So, LOTJ looked to reduce time to market by reducing the environment complexity. Another challenge which was brought to the table was how to improve and make the best use of knowledge and information management.

DNX Solutions was engaged by LOTJ to provide support and implement solutions for these challenges. Together, we decided to push immutability concepts on a new AWS platform which uses an Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) process improving knowledge and information management. Building a demonstration environment for potential LOTJ customers will enable the sales team to expand their reach.

The Solution

Before starting the project, DNX’s team evaluated the organisation’s requirements and utilised DNX’s DevOps approach. This approach guides the team through the DevOps journey while building a perfect foundation, standardising and automating processes, and uses technologies to deliver applications quickly and reliably.

Our solution for this scenario was to modernise the current Java microservices leveraging Docker containers and orchestrate them using AWS Elastic Container Service clusters.

With a focus on reducing configuration management, we modernised the application by applying the 12-factor concepts and we improved the continuous deployment process by using environment variables in SSM Parameter Stores. The ECS Service uses task definitions, a powerful tool to achieve immutability and run multiples containers across the cluster instances sharing the same file system, where EFS have mounted targets across the different availability zones.

AWS Foundation

As with most projects at DNX, we start with deploying our AWS platform as this is the first layer of modernisation. DNX built the AWS Well-Architected Foundation by applying effective infrastructure code patterns, bringing instant value to our clients as it covers the essential aspects for an organisation which has DevOps culture in its DNA.

AWS Well-Architected Framework Pillars

You can see more details about our AWS Platform solution at this link.

Once we have prepared the foundation, we start the modernisation phase in which the DNX team prepares the microservices for the new cloud environment. We eliminated the need for configuration management by applying immutable concepts into the building stage of the Bitbucket pipelines that deploy the application to production in AWS. There is no need to access production or staging servers once they are up-and-running. If an exceptional need arises, the connection is secured by the SSM Session manager.

DNX uses spot instances for the ECS cluster, generating an estimated 70% cost reduction on average. Our solution implements a well-architected account topology in AWS. Law of the Jungle can have testing and development environments identical to production with reduced or similar computing power. Adding a management account facilitates security and audit aspects, keeping production and non-production environments secure and available, even during an audit process or security tests.

Continuous Delivery:

The container built during the building stage will be deployed across both AWS accounts and environments. This ensures the same application that is tested is deployed to production, providing consistency during bug fixes and new releases.

Steps:

• Application build
• Application Docker Build and Push to ECR
• Application ECS Blue-Green Deployment using AWS Code Deploy
• Automatic deploy to QA / Staging
• Automatic deployment to production with manual approval

During the whole project, DNX executes knowledge transfer sections to Law of the Jungle with our AWS Certified professionals. DNX believes this builds a healthy relationship with customers and partners.

Some of the AWS Services provisioned:

• AWS ECS
• AWS Elastic File System (EFS)
• System Manager
• CloudTrail
• Aurora Cluster
• Cloud Watch
• Code Deploy
• AWS Config

Customer Benefits

DNX Solutions looked to provide a stress-free environment and a safe place for experimentation with faster time to market for new features. DNX provided the conditions and tools in AWS to apply modern and efficient DevOps practices for LOTJ. As a result, LOTJ was able to deploy more features to its users. We also provided a new demo environment where potential customers can trial the solution in a secure and isolated approach on AWS.

To help LOTJ with its knowledge management challenge, the AWS foundation phase and knowledge transfer sections with the DNX team accommodated all knowledge in the code, reducing time on-boarding new team members.