California-based Giumarra Companies is a produce marketing company, working year-round to ensure that tasty avocados, asparagus, and a full line of other fruit and vegetables reach consumers safely. After successfully migrating and rearchitecting their application with Cloudsoft AMP, it was rebranded as the AgriNow service.
The Customer
AgriNow is a world-leader in supply-chain traceability based in the cloud. With AgriNow achieving supply chain traceability has never been easier. AgriNow offers a cloud-based solution that launches in minutes, with a learning curve of just one day.
AgriNow’s state-of-the-art technology puts industry-standard traceability within reach of family-owned farms with limited resources as well as global produce players with facilities around the world.
Giumarra use AgriNow to trace their agricultural produce across the whole of the Americas.
The Problem
Although setup was scripted, there were manual steps involved in the management of the application, including for upgrade and failure recovery. This was increasingly an unacceptable risk: human error, out-of-date documentation, and differences between staging and production were unacceptable as the business scaled.
The Solution
The common manual steps were automated, and monitoring was improved so that more failure recovery scenarios were automatic.
The environment was codified using AWS CloudFormation for infrastructure-as-code, allowing dev and staging environments to be spun up on demand, and to greatly improve the disaster recovery process.
AWS CloudWatch metrics were introduced for monitoring, along with SNS, email and PagerDuty, to alert of (potential) problems. CloudWatch Logs and CloudTrail are now used for logging.
Continuous integration is performed through Jenkins: snapshot builds are tested regularly, and production release artifacts pushed to S3 by the build pipeline, then the release pipeline is manually triggered for the automated deployment to the production environment.
Cloudsoft AMP is used for automating the blue-green deployment. The new release artifacts are used when spinning up a new cluster of EC2 VMs, and then the application load balancer (ALB) is updated to target the new cluster. Auto-scaling is also managed by Cloudsoft AMP, as is restart-on-failure of processes and VMs.
Technologies Used
Technologies used included:
- Cloudsoft AMP
- AWS CloudFormation
- AWS CloudWatch Metrics and CloudWatch Logs, CloudTrail
- Amazon VPC, ALB, EC2, Auto-scaling groups, RDS and S3
- Jenkins
The Result
The biggest risks for AgriNow operations have been addressed: the deployment process has now been automated; dev and staging environments are more similar to production; all but the most extreme failures are handled automatically; a DevOps culture of continuous improvement has been adopted.
The advantages to the business include: improved up-time and fewer pager calls; improved efficiency and reduced risk for each upgrade and rollback, allowing engineers to focus on delivering business value.
With Cloudsoft we have a partner who makes cloud technology work for our business. We are more agile and better integrated than before, which reduces our costs and accelerates our time to market.
- Jim Heil, Head of Quality Assurance at Giumarra.