Revolutionizing DevOps with Automated Deployment Processes

Industry: HiTech

Delivery Center: CSA

Industry Context

In the pursuit of technological innovations and operational excellence, manufacturing companies are constantly looking for modern technologies to streamline processes, accelerate product lifecycles, and optimize resource utilization. Through strategic partnerships with tech experts to accelerate innovation, manufacturers empower themselves to adapt to market demands swiftly, achieve greater agility, and deliver superior products and services to gain a competitive edge.

Client Challenge

Our client, Milwaukee Tool, is a leader in technology, quality, and engineering excellence in the power tool and construction tool industry. DevOps practices at Milwaukee Tool were not emphasized, leading to unclear processes and inefficiencies. The existing Jenkins setup was prone to breakdowns following upgrades or patches, complicating the CI/CD pipeline and impeding the fast-paced design environment that Milwaukee Tool valued. Additionally, there was a pressing need for improved compliance tracking and cost optimization strategies within their AWS infrastructure.

Approach

For Milwaukee Tool’s DevOps transformation, Encora chose AWS due to its robust cloud services, scalability, and comprehensive suite of tools to streamline CI/CD pipelines effectively. Through AWS, Encora introduced the below comprehensive suite of DevOps enhancements to revitalize Milwaukee Tool's infrastructure and CI/CD processes:

Cloud-Native Development: Proposed and implemented a shift of Jenkins to a containerized environment using Kubernetes and AWS Fargate. Jenkins Configuration as Code (JCasC) ensured version-controlled setups for easy rollback and configuration reproduction.
Continuous Integration (CI) & Continuous Deployment (CD): Created wrappers for executing automated QA tests across various devices, including Macs and Android phones, through Jenkins, facilitating a comprehensive automated testing suite.
DevSecOps Strategy & Planning: Empowered developers with a shared library approach to construct their CI/CD workflows autonomously, promoting a platform operations model that fosters innovation and self-sufficiency.
Release Management: Streamlined release management with Jenkins and introduced tagging automation for enhanced compliance and cost tracking, enabling detailed cost center creation and compliance checks.

Monitoring & Observability: Migrated to Datadog for serverless and container-based workloads, which offered unified logging, metrics, and traces across applications, providing a single pane of glass for observability.

AWS Services

Elastic Load Balancing

Amazon Elastic
File System (EFS)

Amazon Elastic
Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Amazon Elastic
Compute Cloud (EC2)

Results

Encora's strategic intervention successfully transformed Milwaukee Tool's DevOps practices, leveraging AWS's robust cloud services to enhance CI/CD pipelines, improve cost visibility, and foster a culture of innovation and empowered leadership. The DevOps transformation led by Encora resulted in significant advancements for Milwaukee Tool:

Accelerated Development Cycles with the migration of Jenkins to Kubernetes and AWS Fargate, along with the introduction of JCasC. The deployment frequency was improved, streamlining the development process.
Improved compliance tracking with tagging automation and the introduction of Datadog for observability. Reduced overall infrastructure costs with more efficient resource utilization and monitoring.