DEVOPS & INFRA CHECKUP

Create and manage infrastructure as code for consistent and reproducible setups. As, a DevOps support company we use Terraform IaC to ensure infrastructure consistency and automate provisioning with cloud services such as AWS, GCP, etc. 

All infra configuration is stored in the code repository. That helps us to manage infra permissions, predictable updates, and save a ton of time to provision small and huge infrastructures compared to traditional manual provisioning.

Automatically adjust resources based on traffic and usage patterns. Balancing and scaling services depend on the application size and the selected infrastructure provisioning provider. 

As an example, we used AWS services with Kubernetes represented in EKS in our SmartSuite project. The Scaling and Balancing strategy was based on Kubernetes cluster autoscaling configured with AWS EC2 autoscaling groups, as well as dynamic application scaling based on a huge number of custom metrics collected by Prometheus exporters.

Streamline code integration and deployment processes to deliver software faster and more reliably. Most of the time we use GitHub Actions and Gitlab-CI. These CI/CD tools have many predefined modules that allow us to deploy application code to a provisioned infrastructure in no time and with security best practices. 

Depending on the size of the development team and development processes, we customize our CI/CD pipelines. 

For example, with more than 50 participants, we implemented a separate infrastructure for each function. This means that our teammates, while working on different features, can actually deploy their code separately to run tests, etc. This helps us speed up development and ensure that bugs and issues are not deployed to production infrastructure.

Implement strong security practices at every level of your infrastructure. 

We have achieved PCI DSS certification on several projects using open-source security monitoring tools from the OWASP Foundation. This helps us ensure that we use network security best practices, keep all packages up to date with security patches, and use best practices to store files and personal data securely. 

We also use secure services such as Keeper and Hashicorp Vault to store sensitive application data such as third-party service tokens, database passwords, etc.

Set up comprehensive monitoring systems to provide real-time insights and proactive issue resolution. 

In all our projects we use monitoring systems based on project size and cost-effectiveness. These could be external services for infrastructure and application performance monitoring, issue alerts, and centralized log storage services such as DataDog, Newrelic, Sentry, PagerDuty, etc. These could also be self-hosted solutions with Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK stuck. This monitoring data helps us find bottlenecks, plan infrastructure scaling strategies, and detect potential applications and infrastructure problems. 

We create custom alerts based on the needs of specific applications and infrastructure to ensure rapid response to potential application outages.

Ensure business continuity with robust backup and disaster recovery strategies. 

For all our projects, we implement various backup strategies, from duplicating data to external storage to more complex designs with real-time data replication, etc. Our engineers also perform disaster recovery and backup consistency tests at least once a month.