Overview
In November 2021, a leading airline chose DX1 to enable their DevOps transformation. Our client was looking to achieve a full end-to-end DevOps transformation project, moving away from a traditional self-managed CI/CD solution to a SaaS-based offering.
Our client faced several complexities with self-managed infrastructure constraints, including upgrades, administration, and maintenance of GitLab instances on their infrastructure. In addition, their team had to manage and maintain Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to achieve compatibility with GitLab self-managed instances.
DX1 migrated 1,600 projects in 3 months, after a 3-month planning and investigation procedure. The project had complex project dependencies (JavaScript, Node.JS and Ansible configuration management). Time limitations and speed-to-market became an additional challenge for the client team, whose long-term vision is to move their toolsets to Software as a Service (SaaS), where it adds the best value.
During the investigation DX1 discovered that there were 2 GitLab instances being used and paid for by the client. DX1 assisted the customer with subscription consolidation.
Challenges
- Ensuring availability and uptime of the self-managed CI/CD tooling
- Scaling to meet demand
- Keeping up with security patches and updates
- Managing costs
Overall, managing the GitLab infrastructure independently became complex and required significant time, expertise, and resources to ensure it remained reliable, secure, and able to support the needs of our client.
Solutions
DX1 was engaged to assist our client with migration of the CI/CD tooling to a SaaS-based offering, which provided the customer with the flexibility and scalability they required. DX1 delivered the implementation services in sprints using agile methodology with deep technical expertise in Cloud, Automation, and Security.