29 August 2019
About The Client
Tix is a ticket booking application based in Australia, with a single goal of making live events more affordable & accessible. They take out the pain of searching different sources to find tickets and put them all in the palm of your hand with the TIX app. The application operates in 6 cities across 5 countries with over 1.60 million members & app users.
The Challenge
In this competitive era, every business aims at providing the best product and service to its customers in no time. TIX aims at creating one platform where live entertainment can be affordable and more accessible. For this, the client was developing a B2C online booking application to be hosted on AWS cloud and had two prime requirements:
- They were looking for AWS expertise that would provide solutions on AWS and help them implement the entire Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) with no manual intervention and auto rollbacks in the case of deployment failures with AWS services.
- A highly scalable and reliable architecture for their application.
- A CapEx based solution instead of an OpEx for the application, in order to change the architecture of the application, later if needed.
The Solution
- They were looking for AWS experts that would help them provide solution for shortening their development cycle with reduced deployments and auto roll backs.
- The client had 3 different environments, Dev, SIT and Production Environment. For each pipeline, unique AWS CodePipelines were implemented for automated deployments.
- WebHooks were configured for each Pipeline so that the pipelines would get triggered with every commit.
- AWS Parameter Store was used to store & secure the configuration data which will be replaced at the time of deployment based on the environment.
- Jenkins was configured for MS builds which will push the binaries to AWS S3 to manage, organize and secure the data.
- A package manager server was also set up from where the application can down load the Node and NuGet packages, not making it available to the public internet for downloading the packages. This in return reduced the build time.
- Code Deploy was used to deploy the artifact to the target servers, in order to avoid downtime during the deployment.
- Notifications were set up at the pipeline level so that client can be notified about new deployments and failures.
- Rollbacks were configured; in case of a failed deployment, previous stable version will be deployed.
- CloudFormation scripts were written for infrastructure to replicate the architecture in a short period of time.
AWS Architecture
The Benefits
The entire process for all the 3 environments was successfully implemented in time frame of 1.5 months with full automation. After implementing the solutions provided by Rapyder, TIX was able to witness sustainable results for their application development
Here’s a low down of benefits derived:
- With the help of CloudFormation the developers were able to replicate the whole architecture and launch it in no time.
- With fully automated CI/CD solution, the risk of manual prone error was completely eradicated and fastened the development cycle.
- 30% of developers’ time is now invested in coding instead of manual deployments and resolving the bugs.
- Manual implementation for a CI/CD solution would have taken around an hour and de-bugging an error would take the whole day. But with fully automated CI/CD solution, the entire process was completed in 10 minutes.
- The CloudFormation script (Infrastructure as Code) made development and deployment process efficient, enabling faster go-to-market feature.