A fully managed DevOps platform in AWS

“Working together with a professional IT partner as Redpill Linpro has given us a modern and secure development platform which frees up time to focus on growing business rather than dealing with infrastructure,” Andreas Kavlie-Borge, Sales Director, Proxima Code

Proxima Code operates in the Nordics and has clients such as Nordea, SpareBank1 and Fana Sparebank. Their solution is a lead handling system which allows their customers to securely distribute leads across business areas, subsidiaries and partners. Through this, customers such as Nordea has a system to share leads between Nordea Bank, their real estate company Privatmegleren, and Gjensidige Insurance, and still be compliant.

Proxima Codes initial setup used EC2 instances on AWS. The solution did not scale well and had developers manually provision infrastructure and manually manage the solution. In addition, every Proxima Code customer has to be compliant with the Norwegian Financial Councils framework for sharing information in between their own legal entities. Therefore, the architecture consisted of multiple static application infrastructure using different subdomains in order to meet these demands.

Redpill Linpros AWS Solution Architects implemented a container architecture using AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) and Fargate, AWS’s serverless compute engine for containers. To meet security demands, each and every Proxima Code customer was set up with their own namespace in EKS. In addition, each customer was given their own RDS/Aurora database and Amazon Elasticache, a fully managed Redis engine. 

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing was implemented in front to automatically distribute incoming application traffic across multiple containers and to the correct Kubernetes namespaces. 

Proximas developers also wanted automated deployment of code to each different customer solution. Redpill Linpros DevOps engineers implemented CI/CD (Continuous integration and deployment) pipelines using Redpil Linpros own fully managed GitLab as a Service and connected it to the AWS EKS service. 

Migrating infrastructure to Kubernetes and establishing deployment scripts allowed Proxima Code to transform the product into a SaaS solution that can be easily maintained and expanded. By using the Ingress feature in Kubernetes, all traffic is directed to the Kubernetes solution. The traffic will hereafter be split up and sent to the right customer solution. This facilitates the possibility to create staging and production environments with different settings, ensuring both security and full automation. 

This solution now allows developers to focus more on developing new features and innovation, instead of manually dealing with traditional operational tasks. 

• transformed a statically deployed solution for individual customers to a completely automated solution, enabling the entire product to become a complete SaaS (software as a service) solution

• standardized deployment routines

• increased data security

• increased scalability

• increased SLA due to migration to Kubernetes

• reduced operations costs

• reduced costs for development and deployment

• automated deployment.