Client Background
Client Need
- Integrate new third-party Windows based VM solution that had its own API with a new product that was being offered in the market
- The solution had to be deployed behind the client’s SSO as a seamless customer experience
- It was challenging as the Kubernetes cluster did not share the same subnet as the Windows VM deployment
- One of the APIs was stateful and required specific routing requirements.
- Windows infrastructure required monthly updates for Microsoft “security fix Tuesday” to comply with security requirements
- Interfaces had to be created to load shared information into the third-party solution and the client solution at deploy time
Our Solution
- Provided custom Envoy configuration and a single pipeline that allowed for rollout of k8s infrastructure and apps in parallel with a Windows VM deployment.
- Conducted Integration tests that ran as part of the pipeline to make sure everything was connected correctly
- Deployed a Packer build that took the latest Microsoft fixes and created an image for automatic deployment
- Reworked the pipeline a year later to implement a multi-VM Managed Instance Group (MIG) with GCP auto-healing
- Worked closely with the “device-driver in-a-box” solution that was delivered by the vendor to create a first-class server solution capable of infinite horizontal scaling
Tools & Technologies
Key Benefits
- Deployed over 20 releases of the third-party solution and hundreds of the client solution
- Automation of the custom deployment pipeline ensured that the entire process took less than 5 hours from a sandbox deploy, then dev, stage and production environments. This included all testing and validation
- In the beginning, the Windows VM had to be rebooted at least daily. Working with the vendor over a period of 18 months, the client finally has a stable server product that hasn’t needed a reboot in months