DevOps & AUTOMATION

DevOps & Automation

Release Reliable Software Faster

• The US East DevOps practice helps large enterprise organizations reduce the time it takes to release reliable software after an idea is born, and to shorten the time between regular releases.
• We named the practice DevOps after the growing movement in software development because ultimately the success of all the principles, processes and practices involved hinge upon the collaboration between your development and IT operations teams to help you achieve business agility.
• DevOps follows the key tenets of the agile software development movement and represents a fundamental shift in how large, distributed enterprise organizations develop and release software. It affects the people, processes and technology of your organization and requires adopting and implementing leading-edge paradigms – such as continuous integration, continuous testing and continuous delivery – in addition to proven best practices in the areas of build automation, configuration management, release management and deployment.

Benefits of Implementing DevOps

Benefits to your business

• Time-to-value is much shorter because IT cycle time is greatly reduced
• Software features are released more quickly and more often
• Releases are stable and predictable, making them more cost-efficient and less stressful on your team
• Your customers’ needs are met sooner and with higher quality
• Wasteful one-off deliveries for specific customers are reduced or eliminated
• Collaboration and trust are built between your development and IT operations teams

Benefits to your customers

• Faster access to new features and functionality
• Ability to accept changes in smaller, more manageable portions
• Less disruptive upgrades that take less time, are less costly and require fewer resources
• Higher value and trust in your software
• Increased visibility and input into features for your next release
• Better ability to plan and introduce change into their environments

US East DevOps Services

The expert consultants in our DevOps practice work hand-in-hand with your team to develop systems and manage change through a process that includes the steps below, all of which can be adapted to address your specific business circumstances.

• Assess
• Design
• Implement
• Manage

Assess

During the Assess stage, we hold workshops with your team to gain a good understanding of your business case for DevOps services, and to ensure that your organization’s key stakeholders understand the methodology, best practices and benefits.

We conduct interviews to understand your current business objectives and challenges; IT performance and processes; and document your current software development lifecycle to determine its impacts on time and resources of your organization. We also assess the capabilities and skills of your staff; and your organization’s capacity for change.

Together, we identify critical issues, then scope and prioritize the changes required.

Design

In the Design phase, we work in close collaboration with you to create the long-term vision for your transformed.

IT organization and its impact on the business.

We create a roadmap that addresses short, medium and long-term priorities for implementing the highest-value change opportunities that were identified during the Assess phase.

The customized roadmap is tailored to your unique business and technology needs, and addresses key challenges, opportunities, resources and dependencies.

Implement

Once your DevOps roadmap is in place, our experienced architects, designers and development consultants assist your team in rolling it out – from small pilot programs to broader organizational changes.

We focus on transferring best-practice knowledge rapidly and effectively to your team to help ensure quality and long-term success.

Manage

Our goals are to help make your team self-sufficient and to encourage culture change and adoption of DevOps agile principles.

Once you have begun implementing DevOps changes, we help you maintain momentum and manage the process however it is needed – project managers, mentors, training plans and resources centers are just a few of our capabilities.

We conduct post implementation reviews to gain insights, make adjustments to your roadmap, and plan for future iterations.

Accomplishments

Global Leader in Alternative Investments

• Kong Enterprise on ECS/Fargate – Lead an effort to deploy multi-region, highly available Kong Enterprise implementation on ECS/Fargate to demonstrate how the Kong Gateway can be deployed on ECS/Fargate to provide a highly secure, performant, reverse proxy caching ingress to mission critical backend APIs.
• Custom Kong Plugins – Designed, developed and deployed multiple python based and LUA based Kong Plugins in support of needs special to specific business units as well as internal IT orgs.
• Kong Konnect Observability Framework - Assisted in the architecture and automated deployment of a Kong Gateway metrics observability platform based on Grafana and Prometheus.
• Automated Pipeline Helpers – Extensive development of boto3 lambdas to support individual services required during the stand up and tear-down of Git-Hash based development environments.
• Hash Based Deployments – Architected, developed and deployed a git hash-based deployment mechanism that enables the customer to automatically and uniquely deploy serverless environments through pull-requests and/or push-button.
• Serverless – Extensive use of AWS serverless technologies as well as the “serverless frameworks” to provide highly available, scalable and performant using AWS services mentioned above.
• Terraform – Responsible for design, development and deployment of golden/core Terraform modules deployed to Terraform Cloud and consumed by all business units.
• Operations as a Service – Introduced RunDeck as component to provide a “self-service”, auditable, operations solution. Allows to continuously improve operability responsiveness and efficiency through automated, self-service operations.
• Coding - Write high quality python and C# command line utilities against internal and external APIs, delivering custom tooling to our pipelines and processes.
• Diverse Support - Provide support and staff augmentation for supporting the various processes, services and engineering teams deploying and updating software throughout the organization.
• Gitlab - Created shared Gitlab CI/CD platform that enables the company to create consistent build, testing and deployment pipelines, enabling engineering to have the tooling to consistently run their software through the full software development lifecycle.
• Kubernetes - Researched and implemented kubernetes admissions controllers that enforce validity and signing of docker images before they can be deployed. This ensures all images being run within the company adhere to our strict security standards.

Dow Jones

• Multi-Cloud Lifecycle Management - A standardized “push” application deployment approach based upon blueprints that can be deployed across multiple internal & external cloud providers.
• Guaranteed Consistency through DevOps- A workflow automation process that enables us to produce constructs to meet business demands, maintain standards, and repeatedly deliver with consistency. The process enables us to provide evolving infrastructure and software as it transitions into live operations.
• Deployment Independence - Allows for flexible and opportunistic choices of cloud providers for deployment of workloads.
• Performance - Ensuring apps are highly performant and optimized for deployment in the cloud
• Governance - Implementation of financial controls, budgeting, chargebacks, logging, audit logging
• Self Service Access to Services - Provide a centralized self-service based mechanism to provision, deliver, manage and operate cloud services for internal News Corp customers

GE Digital

Our present Cloud / DevOps endeavor is with GE Digital where we are helping them with their Industrial Internet of Things, IIOT, called PREDIX which is their platform for the Industrial Internet that is powering digital industrial businesses that drive the global economy. By connecting industrial equipment, analyzing data, and delivering real-time insights, Predix-based apps are unleashing new levels of performance for a wide variety of assets. US East is providing Architecture, Systems Engineering/Programming, Project Planning and Documentation services in helping launch this dynamic industrial platform.

Raymond James

Lead the effort to develop a "DevOps Center of Competence". Instrumental in laying the foundation to provide digitally consistent infrastructure & automated app deployments

GE Capital

Fully automate the building, testing, and deployment of infrastructure and software via Chef DevOps Automation

The City of New York

Architecting and implementing continuous delivery pipelines to support workloads for internal/external and public/private cloud deployments.