Criton is an innovative new platform for the hospitality sector. It allows accommodation operators to digitise their guest information and create an easy to use guest portal for all of their guest facing technology. This portal enhances the guest experience and allows hoteliers to increase their guest engagement and maximise their in-stay spend.
The Problem
Criton were developing and launching a new application using non-DevOps practices. They were under business/competitive pressure to iterate faster, to deploy their application repeatedly to staging and production for increased collaboration and productivity with a growing team, and to ensure their application met their reliability requirements as the business scaled.
Having migrated their application suite to AWS only months before from a fixed infrastructure hosting provider, Criton wanted help for setting this up in AWS, and for the engineering team to take full advantage of AWS by adopting DevOps practices.
The Solution
Cloudsoft built a CI/CD pipeline using AWS CodePipeline, and used AWS CloudFormation to provision and maintain it. AWS CodeDeploy was used for blue/green deployment.
AWS EC2 Auto-Scaling Group health-checks were used along with AWS Application Load Balancer health checks for failure detection and auto-recovery. AWS CloudWatch metrics and UptimeRobot were also used, along with AWS Simple Notification Service, email and PagerDuty, to alert of (potential) problems.
Technologies Used
Technologies used included:
- AWS CloudFormation
- AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild and CodeDeploy
- AWS CloudWatch Metrics and CloudWatch Logs, CloudTrail
- AWS EC2, VPC, Application Load Balancer, Auto-scaling groups, PostgreSQL Relational Database System, S3 and Secrets Manager
The Result
The CI/CD pipeline, along with DevOps practices, helped Criton deliver their application faster and to a high quality, improving metrics such as lead time and change failure rate.
The outcome is that changes can be made with confidence: more frequent deployments mean smaller changes, reducing risk; automated tests and automated deployment to staging catch errors quickly; automated health checks during upgrade and subsequently in production give fast feedback; and automated rollback/rollforward means issues can be addressed quickly.
Cedric Clain, Lead Architect at Criton, said “Our new testing and release process has delivered excellent business value for shipping features faster and more reliably. The Cloudsoft Engineering team have done a great job building this CI/CD pipeline and helping us on our DevOps journey. We look forward to continue working with Cloudsoft.”