AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Accelerating DevOps Transformations Using LTI’s Infinity DevOps
By Austin Sequeira, Head of Cloud Innovation – LTI
By Lewis Tang, Sr. Solutions Architect – AWS
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| LTI |
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Many enterprise organizations are undergoing digital transformation to scale their business. Being digital requires DevOps at scale to rapidly adopt new technologies, transform legacy applications, innovate faster, and respond swiftly to ever-changing customer needs.
Using modern enterprise solutions like DevOps allows enterprises to address long-standing challenges in software delivery, delays in time-to-market, and high operating costs while enabling them to sustain productivity and adapt to change. DevOps effectuates purposeful integration, collaboration, and communication across enterprise teams globally, playing a vital role in delivering improved continuous integration and deployment.
Even as DevOps implementations proliferate, however, the diversity and complexity of the involved people, processes, and technology pose a major hurdle in accelerating innovation. Below are a few key challenges to an effective DevOps adoption:
- DevOps maturity: Understanding and evaluating the current tools, technology stack, and automation levels to initiate the DevOps transformation journey.
- Longer release cycles: Manual processes and subject matter expert (SME) dependencies cause delays in faster onboarding of applications as well as CI/CD executions.
- DevOps standardization: The lack of a standard approach to DevOps creates a disparity in the tools, processes, and resources being utilized across projects.
- End-to-end governance: Lack of centralized knowledge base, limited or inefficient metrics, and coordinated insights restrict end-to-end visibility and governance of application lifecycle.
Larsen and Toubro Infotech (LTI) is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with the DevOps Consulting Competency. With its experience in DevOps, enablement, and continuity services, LTI has helped enterprises to onboard, standardize, automate, and manage the delivery processes effectively.
In this post, we’ll walk through how DevOps can be implemented via tools like Infinity DevOps, a self-service, scalable DevOps platform by LTI. It’s designed to provide faster, stable, and continuous deliveries to create leaner automated processes and accelerate delivery and productivity.
Infinity DevOps from LTI
Many of LTI’s enterprise clients are looking to invest in smart DevOps solutions to accelerate the software development lifecycle and help gain business agility, boost operational productivity, and improve security. The exclusive DevOps solutions at LTI are structured to enhance operational efficiencies, strengthen customer engagements, encourage knowledge transfer, and effect change management for impactful business transformations.
To minimize manual efforts in building and managing integrations between multiple tools and gaining end-to-end visibility, LTI has adopted a one-stop, platform-driven approach that enables seamless integration and accelerates DevOps adoption.
Infinity DevOps is LTI’s comprehensive suite of 50+ tool integrations that involves planning, source control, quality assurance, security, release management, and monitoring activities. The platform supports continuous assessment, end-to-end secured tool integration, CI/CD or deployment, automation and value stream-based visibility across the application, and release lifecycle management.
Solution Overview
Infinity DevOps is a highly extensible and tool-agnostic platform providing end-to-end automation of CI/CD workflows by integrating with preferred toolsets in the ecosystem. It integrates with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring in deeper insights and establish sustainable DevOps.
The Infinity DevOps platform includes three major building blocks:
Workbench
Workbench orchestrates workflow-based pipeline configurations, enabling users to rapidly onboard applications onto the DevOps ecosystem.
The module follows a template-based CI/CD standardization approach to automate and stabilize the software release cycles. Purposeful templates are available for modern technologies such as Java, .NET, Angular, Node.js, and Python, to name a few.
The workbench provides a simple and intuitive self-service solution facilitating seamless infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service on AWS, and other cloud-native integrations. It allows users to build pipelines that are secure and stable with high performance.
This module can be leveraged by users with minimal technology experience for building baselined CI/CD workflows. Workbench grants role-based access control (RBAC) and security to users across tools and platforms, and is built using a plug-and-play architecture that allows for custom connector development to integrate with tools available in the client ecosystem.
Value Stream
The Value Stream building block provides a bird’s-eye view of the DevOps lifecycle across a portfolio of projects and programs. Data from heterogeneous tools is collected and stored in a centralized knowledge base, providing co-related and cognitive insights.
With insights into the application lifecycle management, Value Stream offers complete transparency across project metrics for key stakeholders to make informed decisions. It facilitates persona-based governance and exhibits unified dashboards for real-time portfolio and project status across the DevOps lifecycle.
The module furnishes comprehensive lean metrics for gap analysis and provides highly customizable KPIs and thresholds, while also offering SLA management for DevOps sustainability.
Discover
The Discover building block helps conduct an as-is maturity assessment of existing processes and tools across the five key dimensions:
- Culture and collaboration
- Application lifecycle management
- Infrastructure management
- Visibility and feedback
- Governance
This establishes a strong DevOps foundation and streamlines process workflows to build a strategic DevOps transformation journey by providing gap analysis and recommendations to re-align DevSecOps processes wherever necessary.
Discover dispenses real-time tracking of DevOps maturity index, providing a North Star-like strategic view along with the ability to furnish downloadable assessment reports.
Key Benefits of Infinity DevOps
While enterprises are inherently using DevOps to deliver accelerated, superior quality, and cost-effective solutions, it’s vital to further accelerate and improve maturity through increased automation.
LTI’s automated solution through Infinity DevOps has helped customers to enhance their DevOps maturity. Let’s look at a few key benefits of the platform:
- Accelerate DevOps adoption and shorten time to market
- Boosts user experience with self-service DevOps enablement.
- Enhances value-stream visibility via persona-based dashboards and metrics.
- Enables better governance with standardization of tools and processes.
How Infinity DevOps Works
Infinity DevOps is a cloud-based platform running within a private subnet in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The platform is hosted in the customer’s AWS account and helps comply with all the required security guidelines.
Figure 1 – Infinity DevOps architecture.
User Interface
This layer consists of visual screens for the three key building blocks—Workbench, Value Stream, and Discovery—and is packaged in the form of a Docker container. The platform is integrated with Azure Active Directory for user authentication and has RBAC mechanisms to ensure controlled access across the feature set.
Supported users of the platform include:
- Admin: Controls and manages the overall platform configurations like adding, modifying, and deleting DevOps tools, onboarding new users, and providing platform access while modifying existing access and revoking user access.
- Members: Helps with onboarding new applications, modules, and pipelines, viewing overall project health with read-only access to dashboards.
Backend Service
This service layer consists of a set of API services for tool integrations, automation hooks, data telemetry, template generation, pipeline onboarding, value stream, SLA management, and machine learning (ML) capabilities. It’s integrated with AWS SDKs to enable seamless data flow within the platform.
Database Layer
This forms the persistence layer for the platform. It contains the schema and metadata deployed in the private subnet and with only specific ports open to application security groups. The platform maintains data privacy through encryption, both for data at rest as well as data in transit. MongoDB is used for data persistence.
Vault
All of the sensitive data across the platform is maintained within HashiCorp Vault.
Getting Started with Infinity DevOps
You can get started with Infinity DevOps to accelerate DevOps adoption by taking the following steps:
- AWS account creation: Identify an existing account or create a new AWS account within your environment.
- Resource provisioning: Provision the following resources and services within the AWS account:
- Virtual machines
- Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instance
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users
- Installing Infinity DevOps: To install Infinity DevOps, you’ll have to connect with LTI DevOps consultants. You can reach out to the LTI team at infinitycloud@lntinfotech.com.
Once the Infinity DevOps installation is completed, LTI team will provide details on read/write access to the DevOps tools available in your environment.
Summary
In this post, we described the need for implementing DevOps practices for faster application development, testing, and deployments.
Enterprises are undergoing DevOps transformations at a faster pace to achieve innovation and business agility. Seamless collaboration across Dev and Ops teams, automation at application development and release cycle, and security guardrails are the foundations of a successful transformation.
LTI’s Infinity DevOps addresses these enterprise needs by establishing a scaled DevSecOps platform enabling smooth application onboarding, insight-based governance, and a continuous maturity assessment framework. The platform provides productivity improvement, operational efficiency enhancement, and overall technical debt reduction.
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LTI – AWS Partner Spotlight
LTI is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and global technology consulting and digital solutions company helping more than 400 clients succeed in a converging world.