DevOps for Food Online Retail/CRM project

Client background:

An Israeli company that provides digital signage and mobile marketing solutions to enhance sales, profitability, and customer experience in retail.

Business Challenge: successfully launch a new web application designed for retail chains.

Project goals:

- Rollout of application for production use
- Implementation of cost control
- Creation of Terraform IaC from scratch
- Set up monitoring for logs and metrics
- Implementation of necessary security controls
- VPN implementation for the development environment
- Further general support

Solution overview:

Developed a plan for rolling out the application to production. The plan included infrastructure as code (IaC) based on Terraform and a thorough release process with proper management of development and staging environments
Implementation:

1) A full cycle for application rollout/deployment can be achieved with one Terraform command using Helm provider.
2) Cost optimization was carried out and it resulted in an 18% reduction.
3) The whole scope of the infrastructure required for the app is described in Terraform with all required dependencies.
4) Grafana + Loki + FluentD with Prometheus node agent fulfills all the requirements for logging and monitoring.
5) WAF2 regional with ALB integration allows detection and mitigation of major security risks for web applications and allows flexible configurations for regional quotas to make it flexible for development and testing purposes.
6) VPN is deployed with per-user custom profiles.
7) Ongoing support includes general infrastructure maintenance, product releases, capacity planning for further development, and day-to-day due diligence aimed at product facilitation.

Resources: AWS, EKS, ALB, RDS Postgres, EC2, RabbitMQ, Docker, Terraform, Helm, Grafana, Prometheus, GitLab, Route53, WAF2
Results: The application is currently in use by real clients, with an increasing number of corporate clients and end users. The Kubernetes-based solution has proven to be a cost-effective and robust backend implementation with a high level of flexibility. The utilization of AWS WAF2 and good endpoint management has eliminated security concerns and provided ample bandwidth to fulfill initial requirements while allowing for future extensions.