A project to initially set up a QA environment with infrastructure as code which in turn delivered a wider infrastructure as code capability to the business. The QA environment had to bear resemblance to what was currently live in production and as such was virtual machine based in Azure. To create the infrastructure OpenTofu (Terraform) was used along with Terragrunt for environment and remote state management. The infrastructure as code had to be flexible enough to gradually assume management of an existing production environment as well as allow the scalability of being able to provision many other kinds of environments on demand. The architecture of the OpenTofu code was in such a way that different groups of people could have different levels of access to different projects, increasing overall security and allowing for self-serve in the future. The wider capability of doing infrastructure as code had many benefits. The ability to rapidly deploy and configure short lived environments played a significant part in speeding up a major Microsoft SQL server upgrade. To ease management of some Linux based services, Hashicorp Packer was introduced. This allowed the creation of secure, up to date images for these services that could then be rolled out in a controlled manner with OpenTofu. This also helps the business become familiar with an image build and promotion approach which will help as they take steps towards containerisation later on.

At Arden there were two projects to deliver: an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) based platform and development of their serverless integrations. In order to improve developer and student experience, existing on-premises and Amazon EC2 based workloads were migrated to a new Kubernetes based platform. This allowed developers to securely deploy their applications (with ArgoCD) as well as diagnose problematic deployments (with Grafana, Prometheus and Loki) without being blocked waiting for infrastructure engineers to become available. Administrative tasks such as DNS record and TLS certificate management were fully automated with Certificate Manager and External DNS. In order to be future ready, the platform was developed and tested with support for IPv6 and ARM-based compute allowing for easy adoption later on. Infrastructure as code was used from the ground up allowing easy upgrades and scalability. A new student record system (SITS) was being implemented in a large project that affected all areas of the business. A major component of this project was integrating many other systems that were not directly compatible with SITS. Such components included SaaS, off the shelf and in-house products spanning both AWS and Azure. All integrations had to be event driven and accommodate complicated business logic. To achieve this technologies such as AWS Lambda, SNS, SQS, Azure Logic Apps, Functions and Service Bus were used. During this project, contributions were made to open source projects including External DNS for Kubernetes and Prometheus.

A part time project where the main goal was to implement Azure Front Door into the existing infrastructure automation to improve security and performance of an application with hundreds of tenants. Performance improvements were achieved by leveraging caching, compression and the content delivery network to service static and cached content from regional distribution points. To improve security Front Door Web Application Firewall (WAF) was used to identify improvements in the application such as ways to filter/encode data that was transmitted to/from the application and customers web browsers. The WAF also enabled visibility to how the site was currently being scraped/attacked and potential mitigation. As well as delivering Front Door, other small tasks carried out included creating another environment with infrastructure as code which required heavy refactoring. The refactoring was mainly converting scripted infrastructure deployment steps into proper infrastructure as code (Bicep in this case) and fixing infrastructure deployment pipelines that were failing for various reasons.

A project to pick up support for and improve an existing Kubernetes based infrastructure platform hosted on Microsoft Azure. Initially, the primary focus had been to automate continual time consuming tasks and to reduce the number of support tickets. This has been achieved by implementing technologies such as External DNS for Kubernetes and Certificate Manager. Reliability has been improved by consolidating and improving complex build pipelines by utilising YAML libraries for Azure DevOps and introducing infrastructure as code with Terraform. After stabilising the platform focus shifted to evolving the platform to be more efficient, scalable and developer friendly. ArgoCD was implemented allowing developers to version control their applications configuration and 'self-serve' deployments all the way up to production. All core infrastructure provisioning was automated with Terraform as were any new services that were launched. As the platform grew further Thanos was implemented to handle the large amount of metric data produced and allow a single pane of glass view across multiple Kubernetes clusters for monitoring. Significantly more people are now buying cars online. The evolution of the infrastructure platform helped Drivvn to meet their customers growing needs. Having the infrastructure as code ready also allowed us to work with one of the Drivvn development teams to deliver a new product from inception to launch within a few weeks. The initial infrastructure was provisioned and available within hours. We then worked with the team to refine the build pipelines and infrastructure as they developed the product. Since launch, the infrastructure supporting this product has been extremely reliable and developers are able to safely test and deploy changes without being blocked by other teams.

An exciting greenfield project creating a new infrastructure platform using Amazon Web Services, Docker and Kubernetes for SAP Commerce based e-commerce websites. This resulted in Eclipse being able to meet their customers demanding e-commerce needs by being able to handle very high levels of traffic when required (during sales, etc) whilst being very cost efficient as traffic recedes in quieter periods.