Industry

Consumer Good Enterprises

Technology

Amazon EKS
AWS ECR
Amazon RDS
Amazon S3
AWS WAF
AWS Shield Advanced
AWS Network Firewall
AWS Security Hub
AWS GuardDuty
AWS Inspector
Amazon CloudWatch
AWS Config
Amazon SES
Elastic Load Balancer
Amazon EFS
Karpenter
Terraform
GitLab
ArgoCD
Prometheus
Grafana
Elastic Search
Kibana

Overview

A pioneer in Vietnam’s consumer goods manufacturing, has embarked on a strategic DevOps adoption to support its ambition of becoming one of 30 largest dairy companies in the world. By collaborating with Renova Cloud and leveraging AWS’s powerful cloud solutions, they have successfully formed a specialized DevOps squad team that can build and operate a flexible, scalable, and cost-efficient platform. This transformation enabled them to efficiently collaborate, manage diverse workloads, and ensured stable infrastructure performance, allowing this company to continue delighting consumers with stellar products and services.

Key Challenges

As the first step towards its ambition, this manufacturer set a goal to optimize business operations through automation and data analysis. However, the existing division between the IT and Application teams, along with gaps in CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) skills, created challenges in establishing continuous delivery and cross-functional workflows—both crucial for achieving its goal.

Another challenge was managing fluctuating workloads during peak periods, as the existing on-prem infrastructure lacked the resources to automatically adapt to surges in traffic. Consequently, the lack of automation led to manual errors and slower delivery speeds, frequently impacting the ability to meet business requirements effectively.

On the other hand, the customer relied on multiple core applications to enhance customer experience and was increasingly integrating while progressively integrating advanced technologies such as Data Analytics and AI/ML, which required modern technology stacks. These key components generated valuable insights for the management team, informing future decision-making and creating added value for customers by analyzing shopping behaviors, supporting loyalty programs, and identifying trends across customer segments. However, they introduced data privacy concerns as well as integration compatibility issues with the existing system.

Solution

To tackle the first problem, Renova consulted this dairy company to form a cross-functional squad combining developers and operations to enhance collaboration and shared responsibility, breaking down silos and fostering a DevOps culture. In parallel, we conducted a 2-day workshop on AWS CodePipeline and Terraform, equipping the client’s team with the necessary automation expertise to address the CI/CD and IaC skill gaps.

The DevOps best practices that were implemented during this project include:

  • Terraform for IaC: Eliminated manual infrastructure setup, streamlining deployments.
  • CICD: Leveraged Gitlab and ArgoCD to manage the pipelines.
  • Auto-scaling: Implemented HPA and Karpenter for different scaling needs.
  • EKS enhanced observability: Integrated add-on Container Insights for faster troubleshooting.
  • Distributed tracing: Enabled visualization of application traces and service dependencies.
  • Cluster monitoring: Setup Prometheus and Grafana to provide curated dashboards for detailed metrics and logs at each node and pod level.
  • Application logs: Setup ElasticSearch for application logs and indexing along with Kibana for analysis.
  • Runbook documentation: Detailed predefined steps and system configurations for consistency.

On the other hand, Renova Cloud implemented a comprehensive migration strategy, focusing on modernizing applications, enhancing the data platform, optimizing architecture, and strengthening security to address the client’s operational challenges and optimize technological infrastructure.

Services on AWS

  • On-demand AWS resources: Enabled frequent POCs and pilot projects, allowing teams to experiment and innovate without high upfront costs, accelerating business agility.
  • Amazon EKS flexibility: Supported quick feature deployments in a containerized environment, enabling rapid updates and improvements to enhance the customer experience.
  • Amazon RDS for databases: Performance Insights monitored database performance and resource utilization, helping teams quickly identify and resolve bottlenecks.
  • Amazon S3 integration: Used AWS SDK for seamless storage and retrieval of static content, ensuring efficient data management and accessibility.
  • CloudFront distributions: Provided secure HTTPS endpoints and low-latency content delivery by caching and serving data from edge locations, improving global performance and availability.
  • AWS WAF & Shield Advanced: Strengthened security defenses by providing real-time protection against cyber threats, ensuring compliance with internal security policies and enhancing visibility into potential attacks.

Benefits

  • With the majority of changes in the development process involving DevOps practices, new environments and resources provisioning time decreased from days to hours.
  • New products and features are released within 3 months which usually takes more than 6 months in the past.

Conclusion

The partnership with Renova highlighted how the strategic adoption of DevOps and AWS’s powerful solutions significantly transformed the client’s operation and IT infrastructure. AWS offers a flexible, scalable platform that seamlessly integrates AI/ML capabilities into applications, while optimizing infrastructure and reducing costs, enabling the company to effectively address its dynamic business requirements.