Meeting 7Targets’ Automation Targets

Solution

To address the specific challenges faced by the client, Applied AI Consulting designed the following solution: 

• Implemented GitLab for versioning control. Git is a popular open source code repository as well as a software development platform for collaborative working on DevOps projects. Not only is the platform free (although there is a paid version, too.), unlike GitHub, it offers CI/CD capabilities, and a location for online code storage and issue tracking. 
• GitLab repository allows hosting of different versions, enabling users to inspect code and roll back to a desired version in the event of any problems. GitLab supports each stage of the software development lifecycle, enabling DevOps capabilities. It comes with a continuous integration (CI) Capabilities built in, which allows development teams to automate code building and testing. GitLab also provides security features, presenting developers with scans—within their native CI pipeline—and dashboard assists showing vulnerabilities. (CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration-Continuous Delivery/Deployment. It is a set of practices that allows developers to introduce automation into software development stages—building, testing, deployment, etc.—so they can make changes to the code and deploy them in production without waiting for a release window).
• GitLab flow model was implemented for branching strategy.
• GitLab is built on the same basis as GitHub, and offers similar functionality for source code management but has the advantage of being free for individuals and small businesses, compared to GitHub which charges for private repositories. For these reasons, and because the client was familiar with GitLab, AAIC chose to implement GitLab as the version control system. Gitlab CIs were set up to be triggered whenever any commit was made to the corresponding branch of each repository. Viz. As soon as the code was merged into develop and main branch, Gitlab CI would get triggered and pull the code from repository and trigger the build the code.
• Based on the repository storage type, GitLab CI generates Zip files and container images with the libraries and tools needed to upload those to the selected AWS S3 bucket and AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR) respectively for respective development and production environment.
• Upon successful build, Another Gitlab CI job will be triggered and it will deploy the artifacts (Containers and Lambda Zip files ) to the Lambda and ECS environments.
• At the end, series of automated tests are executed to verify deployments and, in the event of any glitches, Gitlab CI rollbacks implemented to deploy the previously stable running version of the application.