EN 
PL AWS AMI Lifecycle Management Automation
Adanto Software helps an $8 billion-dollar Professional Staffing global leader in its aggressive plans to be a cloud-only company, by taking the complexity out of provisioning the latest versions of IT-approved Amazon EC2 virtual servers in the cloud for approved company-wide use.
Situation
- Client has very aggressive goals of becoming a cloud-only company
- Corporate IT has been overwhelmed by business demands for provisioning virtual servers (EC2 and S3 buckets) in the cloud
- The provisioning process lacked any deployment standards, lifecycle management, was manual and prone to series of issues related to security, performance and cost.
- IT SLAs have deteriorated and company was off track to reaching its goals
Solution
Adanto automated the company’s Amazon Machine Image (AMI) Lifecycle Management process to keep AMI’s up-to-date with the latest application build, combined with the latest performance, security patch enhancements, and elastic auto-scaling (dynamic or specific) for load-balancing to optimize required performance with the running costs. The new IT Automation process of AMI release and deployment always utilizes the “golden” version of corporate IT approved AMI base (a uniquely customized copy of an AMI with CloudFormation root volume templates, full copy of the latest version of Linux O/S, application server, and applications customized by the client), combined with the latest Linux OS security patches and performance enhancements released by the Amazon Web Services.
Services performed
DevOps
Security
Infrastructure Services
Administration Services
Amazon Cloud
Key goals
Establishing an easy process of user self-provisioning the IT-approved Amazon EC2 instance or series of instances at the departmental level.
Provisioning cloud tools and instances with the latest available performance and security enhancements available.
Automating AMI Lifecycle Management process to force business adherence to the latest IT-policy standards required for desired cloud computing needs.
Improving IT productivity, and reducing time of IT cloud service delivery to the business.
Key Features
AMI Lifecycle Automation Key Features:
- Utilization of the latest available AMI image according to corporate policy.
- Creation of deployment templates for AMI images. Two templates are created per image: one for a single instance deployment and another for auto-scaling group deployment.
- Publishing all templates to the corporate SharePoint server.
AMI’s application and toolset:
- installation of AntiVirus software, enhanced networking driver, various management, and monitoring tools
- configuration of name resolution service, hostname, Chef server access
AMI’s O/S set:
- Windows Server family: 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2012 R2 with preinstalled MS SQL Server
- Ubuntu Linux: versions 14 and 16
- Amazon Linux: two newest versions
- RedHat Enterprise Linux: 6.x and 7.x versions
Technologies used
- AWS AMI (Amazon Machine Images),
- AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud),
- AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service),
- AWS CloudFormation,
- AWS Cloudwatch,
- AWS CLI (Command Line Interface),
- Jenkins Continuous Integration,
- Sonarqube,
- Maven,
- Nexus,
- HashiCorp Packer,
- Bash scripting,
- PowerShell,
- Chef (Infrastructure Automation),RabbitMQ,
- Git, Bitbucket, SVN
- Slack – notification of an error for configured groups
Result
Adanto Software automation of the AMI Lifecycle Management has moved the client back on track to becoming a cloud-only company. In addition, the automation and new user self-provisioning service has standardized many cloud processes at the company, enhanced cloud performance, improved IT security, and boosted IT productivity (improved IT SLAs).
Adanto’s new IT cloud infrastructure emboldened, empowered, and simply set businesses free to manage their own cloud provisioning, without waiting on IT, but in adherence to the latest IT policies and IT standards.