Hey You automated their continuous deployment pipeline to accommodate the accelerating growth of their platform
Customer Details
Hey You is an Australian startup that connects to over 1,300 cafes and restaurants, serving more than 600,000 unique users. The simple and friendly Hey You interface allows users to order their morning coffee or lunch with a few taps on a mobile app, avoiding the need to wait in crowded lines. Hey You have a vision to revolutionise ordering and payment across the world, with their focus on connecting customers to businesses.
Customer Challenge
After significant business growth, Hey You required increased automation to help scale and cope with the number of users and restaurant partners joining their platform, without suffering an increase in cost.
They wanted to configure the correct tooling setup for their business and implement automation and DevOps practices to enable their developers to move away from manual processes and optimise the management and maintenance of their environment.
Without a DevOps team in place, they decided to bring in an experienced external partner with the right mindset and approach to set up the environment correctly.
PolarSeven Solution
PolarSeven automated the continuous deployment pipeline drastically reducing time to deploy new code into production. The new environment allows for triggered automated deployments and automatic scalability of the application stack.
One of the core requirements of the production environment was to ensure the boot time of new Amazon EC2 instances is as fast as possible. This was driven by the sporadic use by Hey You customers and the traffic profile, including flash traffic on the V2 API application stack.
To meet this requirement, everything was baked into the Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for deployment to production environments.
All other environments (test, staging) maintain consistency with production by executing the same scripts and deployment processes using AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeDeploy. Continuous deployments are executed on a commit trigger on the ‘develop’ branch.
All infrastructure from each application stack, continuous deployment pipeline and build or deployment services are provisioned using AWS CloudFormation and committed to source control.
The AWS security best practices were an important consideration when creating the environment, to ensure there was no manual configuration that could result in back doors into the environment, and to provide a fully automated and scalable environment.
Results and Benefits
The project benefits included:
Fully automated deployment on staging and production
Auto scaling on instances
Significant reduction in running costs saving 10 C4 large servers per day and CPU running 10% more efficiently.
Cultural benefits of the new environment included:
Improved workflow
Easier deployments
Automated testing
Fast rollback to previous versions
Bottom line:
The project paid for itself in approximately 3 months.