How to Automate Deployment Process: 245% ROI Case

All entrepreneurs, startups, and SMBs want to scale their enterprises at the hands of time to serve more customers, produce more valuable products/services, and generate more profit.

Nowadays, most successful and growing companies use multiple helpful software applications for their internal or external processes, and it usually becomes a great challenge while scaling a business.

The matter is that the bigger your company becomes, the more people use the software, and the more time and funds are required for each functionality update, maintenance, and release.

And here comes deployment automation as a magic stick that allows your business to save much time, investments, and increase data transfer accuracy.

But how to automate deployment process for your company’s software in a proper way?

Today, we want to discuss the topic of automated cloud deployment, the benefits of automated deployment, and share the automated deployment case for our client that helped the company to get 245% ROI.

What Is Deployment Automation

In general, automated deployment is the software deployment approach that allows to transform the source code into a ready-to-use software product for customers or employees automatically.

Specifically, automation deployment enables you to move the software from a testing to a production environment, thus making it accessible for end-users.

How does it work?

In simple terms, any software project development includes 3 integral parts: build, test, and deploy.

It means that software engineers first develop the required architecture and functionality you need for your system, thus creating a programming source code.

Next, QA engineers test the developed blocks of features and business logic to make sure there are no significant bugs or errors that will influence the final user experience.

In short, testers ensure the system works exactly the way you want it to function.

Ultimately, DevOps engineers deploy the developed and tested source code from a testing to a production environment, making it accessible for customers, employees, and other end-users.

In terms of development, the application deployment automation pipeline mostly includes the following:

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) is the process of pushing the created development changes to the final environment.

Continuous Testing

Continuous Testing (CT) is about validating those code changes in the specific environment technical specialists pushed to.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery (CD) means transferring the software to the production environment and making it accessible for end-users (employees, customers).

So, automated deployment is part of any software development project success. Besides, it greatly influences the following aspects:

• The time-to-market period
• The number of investments
• The data transfer accuracy
• The scaling opportunities.

Benefits of Automated Deployment

Let’s now discuss the key benefits of automated deployment for your business to better understand why it is crucial to know how to automate deployment process and the way it can influence the final product quality, delivery cost, and other criteria.

1. Time- and cost-efficiency

Manual deployment and delivery processes take much time as they are processes sequentially requiring technical specialists to spend much time that leads to additional expenses for your business.

Automated deployment solves this challenge and allows you to utilize automated deployment pipelines (i.e., continuous integration or CI).

What’s more, automated deployment helps you automatically handle such aspects as setting up a new environment, provision databases, and monitoring tools along with other dependencies.

In simple terms, you can save much time for your technical specialists to focus on the major tasks, which subsequently leads to great cost-efficiency.

2. Decrease errors by eliminating the human factor

Using traditional manual deployment approaches, you can encounter such human factor risks as missing important delivery steps, configuring the wrong software version, and many others.

These situations lead to extra time losses that become additional investments for your business.

The deployment automation approach allows you to minimize the potential risks as it eliminates the human factor, fully automating the deployment pipeline.

No matter how many deployment executions you will handle, automated deployment takes care of the errorless process.

3. Skill-independent deployment process

Manual application deployment automation requires high skilled DevOps engineers to set up and handle the delivery process, which complicates the process. In contrast, automated deployment allows anyone to run the deployment without any difficulties.

This means you can focus the efforts of your technical specialists on major tasks, which gives extra efficiency for the software development project.

4. Highly frequent releases

Automation deployment is about low overhead and high frequency, allowing your development team to test new features and deliver releases frequently.

Mostly, highly frequent releases perfectly suit the agile software development approach, which helps you to leverage all the benefits of incremental development bringing more value to customers and release new updates on demand.

Such companies as Adobe, Netflix, Valve, and others utilize deployment automation to release new updates more often, thus saving much time and funds.

Benefits of Automated Deployment

When Use Automated Deployment for Your Business

As we have mentioned earlier, manual application deployment automation takes a lot of time and technical skills, as your DevOps engineers need to set up an environment, configure relevant databases, monitoring tools, and other dependencies.

Application deployment automation helps you solve all these tasks through high automation, improve delivery accuracy, reduce human errors, save time, and funds thus giving you extra resources for the software development process.

Simply put, your business can avoid tons of repeating tasks and focus your time and investments on other major project development aspects.

How to Automate Deployment Process: Client Case Study

Now we want to discuss the topic of automated cloud deployment and cover a detailed case study for one of our clients.

So, we got a request from the company to help them implement a more efficient security model for their existing application based on .NET Framework 4.8 that was initially run on Amazon AWS cloud platform.

After conducting the project discovery phase, we’ve built a Proof of Concept (POC) providing multiple technology solutions and answering the question ‘how to automate deployment process’.

In order to complete this task, we’ve conducted a deep analysis of the existing infrastructure that included TeamCity (a build management and continuous integration server) and Octopus (an application deployment automation server).

Based on our analysis, we suggested the client migrate its software infrastructure to Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) by Amazon.

One of the core challenges was to implement a microservice architecture using Linux and Windows containers because the existing customer’s application was based on .NET Framework 4.8, while our security model was based on .NET Core.

Drawing on our technical expertise in working with Windows systems and the provided documentation, we have successfully implemented the process of building containers and described our own Help templates for application deployment automation of Windows applications to Amazon EKS.

We have used the existing Continuous Integration tool called TeamCity and organized an efficient process of building containers and testing code.

Moreover, we’ve decided to utilize TeamCity as one of the automated deployment tools for delivering the project containers to Kubernetes.

Besides, we have developed a powerful monitoring system based on Prometheus and its exporters (built-in functionality) for exporting crucial metrics. Currently, we have multiple insightful dashboards for in-depth analysis of the entire software infrastructure, including:

• Containers
• Virtual machines
• Databases (Amazon Relational Database Service)
• Application Load Balancer (an Amazon tool for configuring and routing end-users’ incoming traffic)
• And many others.

Ascendix Tech Stack

Our technical teams utilized the following technologies for application deployment automation and other tasks:

• AWS EKS
• ASP .NET Core
• Aurora MySQL
• AWS Cognito (security model redesign and re-implementation)
• AWS SQA (a simple queue service)
• AWS Lambda (AWS infrastructure optimization and improvement)
• AWS Web Forms
• AWS VM + IIS
• Vue.js

Ascendix Tech Stack for a Project

So, let’s now briefly discuss the key challenges our client had before our successful cooperation on application deployment automation and the technology solutions we’ve delivered to their business.

Client’s initial challenges

• The existing security model didn’t have user entities, which caused lots of issues in permission management and data sharing
• The company was unable to provide their customers with personalized domain credentials for system login
• Cost-consuming infrastructure maintenance and redeployment processes for each organization
• Time-consuming application deployment automation cycle
• Significant service distraction.

Ascendix technology solutions

• Security model redesign and re-implementation for flexible permission management and personalized domain credentials usage
• Multitenancy implementation for just-in-time software version automated cloud deployment and reduction of maintenance costs
• AWS infrastructure improvement and optimization to minimize infrastructure maintenance expenses and automated instance creation for autoscaling
• Powerful monitoring system setup with insightful dashboards to easily collect, process, and analyze crucial metrics that help engineers find root causes of any issues effortlessly
• Stripe payment system introduction and implementation
• Monolith to micro-service architecture migration to simplify autoscaling and reduce costs greatly.

Key Business Results

• Improvement of the existing client’s solution

Ascendix has helped the company to transform its one app into an entire ecosystem that supports existing solutions and implementations of new applications (Admin App, Partner Central, User Interface, Growth Central).

Admin Application is a multitenant web application for security model management that provides a separate user interface for each organization and the functionality of user management on the organization level.

• 245% ROI boost after the successful project development

With the help of application deployment automation, Ascendix helped the client achieve approximately 245% ROI compared to the old deployment approach.

Final Words

Automated cloud deployment is a perfect option for your business to reduce operational time and costs, minimize the error ratio, increase execution, and data transfer accuracy.

We hope our post will help you get an answer on how to automate deployment process through the case study for our client we’ve just shared and discussed.

What’s more, we believe that this content will help you clearly realize the benefits of automated deployment for your business system.

In case you need to automate cloud deployment, infrastructure optimization, or security model improvement, feel free to contact us and get a ball-park estimate for your project.

Ultimately, you can check our case studies to get more insights into the projects we have successfully completed to know how we solved clients’ challenges through implementing next-level software technology solutions.