Politech

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Politech is a web development agency that takes pride in its progressive values and incorporates them into its work. Whether working with clients in the private sector.

THE

CHALLENGE

Politech offers a cutting-edge product called "Blocks" a live SaaS web platform designed for highly effective political advocacy. This innovative solution empowers political campaigns, progressive organizations, and nonprofits by providing robust metrics to gauge their performance and monitor their endeavors, enabling them to achieve maximum impact. However, during the development process, Politech encountered several challenges. Notably, the absence of zero downtime deployment posed a significant hurdle, prompting their pursuit of a configuration management tool that would facilitate simultaneous deployment of their block applications on lower environments.

THE

SOLUTION

In order to introduce any changes to the live infrastructure, we agreed to provide a proof of concept (POC) on staging servers first. Once the POC was approved, we proceeded with implementing the same changes in the production environment. Our engineer was granted access to their staging machine. Through thorough troubleshooting of their applications, we identified issues with their web server configuration file. We made several fixes to the configurations to address the problem and successfully achieved zero downtime deployment. Another request from Politech was to set up a configuration management tool like Ansible. One of our engineers developed Ansible Playbooks to facilitate the deployment of the block app and streamline the automation process, meeting their requirements

Seamless and

scalable signup,

payments & profiles

The infrastructure was set up in four different environments, namely development, staging, pre-production, and production. We shared a detailed inspection report with Politech management, including key points such as right-sizing of instances/machines, cleaning of snapshots, and volume and database management.

For the lower environments, our team reduced the machine sizes that were over-provisioned. We found that 40% of CPU and memory were not utilized at all. Similarly, we reviewed the snapshots and identified those that were two years old, creating a policy to automatically delete snapshots after one month. Their databases were created in RDS (Relational Database Service)

THE

RESULT

Ensuring uninterrupted application availability during updates, whether it involves the backend or frontend system, is a priority for both product owners and DevOps professionals. Zero downtime updates are designed to seamlessly update the system without any disruptions or awareness from the end-users.

The ability to achieve zero downtime deployment is a crucial success factor for any DevOps team striving for operational efficiency and productivity.

Corey Kuwanoe

Co-founder of Politech

"The biggest difference between Cloudastra and other shops we've worked with is their agility and dedication. We've thrown them a lot of curveballs, and they've always managed to figure out a solution."

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