Gladeo: Innovating Faster through Managed DevOps Services in the Cloud
Gladeo, a provider of career navigation platforms and online courses, wanted to private-label their app for various educational institutions, but their existing infrastructure was limited. They also had a tight timeline—Gladeo needed to deploy these private-label sites, with the ability to easily add new sites, within a few months. To support such a rapid change, Lineate built a cloud-based, greenfield DevOps practice and environment—including continuous integration, automated deployment, and monitoring—and migrated the legacy app over to this solution in order to quickly iterate on development.
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Service:
- Managed Services, DevOps, and Automation
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Service:
- Managed Services, DevOps, and Automation
Problem
Gladeo was looking to expand their platform into private-label solutions for schools and universities. The existing site, a traditional Drupal application, was not flexible enough to quickly add complex features and deploy in a multi-site environment.
As a startup, Gladeo needed to iterate quickly and experiment with content and feature ideas to stay ahead of the market, and they needed the service to be securely deployable. They chose Lineate because of our experience in multi-site content management systems and our cloud DevOps practice.
Solution
By building a fully automated DevOps deployment to the cloud, we transformed a Drupal content management system into a multi-site platform with private-label capabilities
Our goal was to create an automated deployment and testing infrastructure where we could introduce new features every two weeks (or every day, if necessary) with minimal risk. We were able to do this quickly by using what we call Lineate’s SuperAwesome Template: a set of technologies, configurations, and DevOps practices that provide staging, tooling, and production environments; strong security; automated monitoring[ and push-button deployment. Using this template, we rolled out the infrastructure in a matter of weeks and dramatically accelerated development of the private=label solution.
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Features
A fully automated Infrastructure as Code cloud infrastructure
Development, staging, production, tooling, and instrumentation servers
Strong security with fully isolated environments
Automated monitoring of application, performance, and security metrics
Continuous integration and one-click automated deployment within three minutes
Isolated private label applications, each running on different DNS domains, using different feature sets and code branches, all served from the same centralized scripts
Specialized security build steps, such as automated vulnerability scanning of dependencies pulled in during the build process
Automated monitoring and dashboards
Any unusual behavior in production is caught by automated alerts and referred to our 24/7 support team.
If a release has unintended side effects, it can be rolled back and replaced with an earlier version in three minutes.
Results
Lineate’s cloud migration services helped Gladeo move their entire legacy app onto AWS with full DevOps practices within two weeks, and within five weeks, all of the basic functionality required to expand and private-label the application was in place. The agile infrastructure, which includes three-minute deploys and rollbacks, dramatically reduces the potential risks when Gladeo experiments with new features. When the first new customers started coming on line, it took about two months to go from gathering initial requirements to development to launch.
Since the initial launch, there have been 58 releases to over 90,000 customers, with no major outages. Thirty-six security updates have been applied, and active monitoring has caught several potential security risks before they were deployed.
Tech stack
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AWS EC2
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Amazon VPC
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Terraform
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Grafana with Graphite
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Jenkins
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Ansible
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OWASP Dependency-Check
