Case Study: Leading telecoms provider

Detailed review of a hybrid AWS and Azure cloud service for a leading Telecoms provider.

Requirements

The organisation wanted to get an expert view of their DevOps implementation, they recognised there were opportunities to improve process and tooling and wanted a third-party view before making any changes. The key focus areas of the engagement were:

In-depth review of the DevOps practices being used to deploy Docker containers and Kubernetes to ensure seamless code deployment across both AWS and Azure.
Focus on the DevOps methods, tooling and pipelines design, to manage risk effectively.
Provide clear gap analysis and recommendations to improve quality of service and enhance developer efficiency.

Critical success factors:

As-Is State

Understand the as-is state of the DevOps environment

Gap Analysis

Provide a detailed view of gaps between the as-is an best practice focusing on the tooling, technologies and ways of working.

Centre of Excellence

Provide guidance on key strategic activities to meet a Centre of Excellence level for DevOps.

Our solution

We undertook a focused review of the DevOps tooling, pipelines, security etc. Key recommendations for improvement included:

Automating the provisioning and deployment processes through pipelines for Terraform, ARM templates, Powershell etc.
Making infrastructure configuration consistent across the organisation, defined “as code” and applied using change management methods.
Ensuring users across the organisation were able to safely provision infrastructure with Terraform, without conflicts and with clear understanding of their access permissions.
Locking all infrastructure created from automation and ensuring updates were only delivered via pipelines.
Ensuring clearly defined policies and procedures were provided on usage of IaC and pipelines.

The output was a detailed technical gap analysis report highlighting areas of improvement and next steps in their cloud maturity journey.

The benefits

The overall strategy focused on establishing a clear and feasible path for implementing the DevOps approach, while also confirming the suitability of the technologies employed to support a multi-cloud environment.

Emphasis was placed on the anticipated benefits, with a commitment to ensuring that the proposed approach, when executed, would lead to improved efficiency and effectiveness within the development organisation.

Furthermore, the reliability aspect of the plan aimed to minimise outages caused by various factors once the suggested changes were successfully deployed.