About

QualityMinds - IT company which offers services in the field of quality assurance, software development and consulting. As the company was growing and more projects were developped the infrastructure setup (based on single vm and bare-metal cluster) was not sufficient any more. They needed support in moving to more modern, scalable and reliable cloud environment.

Challenge

• Having backups of services on the same server as application was running, hardcoded passwords in docker-compose files and hidden appication setup (knowledge 'siloses') were a real struggle for users maintaing, upgrading looking after applications.
• QualityMinds have choosen Hetzner Cloud as its main backbone for infrastructure as the services provided by them were optimal for company needs. In order to achieve final goal multiple apps need to be migrated, updated and newly configured and deployed to meet client needs.
• Security and consistency of data was crucial especially for applications like gitlab, jenkins, jira, confluence, gitlab. New backup/restore system was required to be implemented.

Solution

• Kubernetes: K8S clusters setup was done based on Hetzner cloud provider with a separation between production and test applications. Backup system was implemented and applications were migrated to a new clouds deployments. Proper estimates and analysis was made to make infrastructure exactly for client needs with a possibility to easily scale when needed.
• Gitops: problems with control over applications was solved by bringing in best gitops practices. Having all applications setup versioned and in code make it much easier to control, maintain, upgrade and restore in case of diseaster recovery.
• Cloud best practices: close work with QualityMinds team ends up with a number of cloud-native solutions that transformed completly company infrastructure setup. Implemented processes helped in transformation to delivery agility.

Results

Our expertise helped QualityMinds successfully migrate to cloud with best devops and gitops practices. Our cooperation was then continued in order to go 'hybrid cloud' with Hetzner and Azure. Setting up Argo CD and preparing definitions of all applications in code resulted in significant cost and time savings, regular applications updates and security in case of a diseaster. The model we introduced gave the company a chance to easily scale and migrate in future in case of extended needs for business. Bringing in DevOps and agile methodologies allowed faster and smoother development and delivery. Setup prepared by us will continue to benefit in future in case of changes, growth and new ideas for business development.