DevOps Pipeline Enhancement to Optimize Workflows and Costs

Business Overview

Business Overview

The client is a global medical device provider dedicated to advancing digital treatment options, offering cutting-edge orthopedic and rehabilitation solutions to healthcare practitioners. The company leveraged 3D visualizations to take patient care to a new level. Orthopedic foot scans are uploaded into the cloud environment, processed, and transformed into a highly detailed 3D model in minutes. This allows the shoe cushions to be manufactured strictly according to the patient’s imprint, easily analyze the dynamics of changes, and adjust the treatment based on real-time monitoring.

The client sought to enhance operational efficiency by automating IT infrastructure workflows, accelerating product delivery, and optimizing spending. The company turned to NIX, striving to amplify its in-house capabilities with an expert DevOps talent pool and create an effective cross-functional collaboration for a holistic upgrade across strategy, technology, and operations.

Challenge

By starting the integration of our dedicated team into the client’s workforce with detailed knowledge transfer, we quickly got up to speed for efficient system build, testing, and secure delivery of artifacts from the repository to the production site. We faced the following challenges:

Working with enterprise environments like the client’s, one presumes managing heterogeneous landscapes with microservices architecture, convoluted business logic, multiple interconnections, and tech diversity.

Our task was to migrate massive IT infrastructure from Bamboo to Jenkins while keeping the system operating during a gradual transition within tight deadlines, minimal disruption, and cost-effective execution.

Solution

NIX’s goal was to enhance the client’s team in terms of automation and standardization of IT infrastructure workflows, enhancing Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) and Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Streamlined IT workflows dramatically accelerated the software delivery pipeline, ensuring reduced human error, consistency in the delivery process, faster and error-free releases, and optimized costs.

Architecture

The system IT Infrastructure has a microservice architecture with multiple components, each with its own business logic, including request processing, device snapshot processing, billing, analysis, integrations, and more. Our team worked on its branching and amplification, implementing serverless technologies, cloud-based services, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and container orchestration capacities for its robust functioning.

Pipeline Migration from Bamboo to Jenkins

Pipeline Migration from Bamboo to Jenkins

The client had a Bamboo-based pipeline—a pre-built roadmap for the smooth progress of software building, testing, and deployment. It required the purchase of an expensive commercial license for continuous use and had limited customization and a small plugin ecosystem. To reverse those effects and lay a solid foundation for improved overall efficiency, NIX experts migrated the network from Bamboo to a generic pipeline on CloudBees CI, Jenkins enterprise solution.

Our priority was to make the transition and keep a flawless system functioning while minimizing downtown risks. Thus, migration “as it is” wasn’t a fit for the client. The team leveraged a canary deployment—a progressive rollout of an application that splits traffic between an already deployed version and a new version. Nearly 10% of traffic was rolled out to a subset of users to get feedback and fix bugs if needed and then rolled out fully. This approach is more complicated from the tech side but far cheaper from the maintenance side compared to using the BlueGreen method, which assumes maintaining both pipeline versions simultaneously. As a result, the client saved up to 40% of costs spent on infrastructure maintenance costs, received insights into cloud expenses, and established cost-control policies for informed decision-making.

The cross-functional team keeps providing ongoing pipeline maintenance, testing, troubleshooting, and cluster updating to remain the pipeline performant and flexible.

Third-party Integrations

The healthcare domain is a sensitive and dynamic niche requiring strict data governance, robust stability, and fortified security. The client had a stringent and rigid risk assessment process, where each change had to be approved by the commission manually, which was time-consuming and finally became a barrier to rapid development and deployment. To overcome this, the NIX team integrated and customized the ServiceNow ticketing system for IT operations. This led to automated event creation, approval, and scheduling, configuring the system to operate in multiple regions.

Outcome

Outcome

Working side by side with the client’s staff, NIX’s dedicated team empowered the company to seamlessly scale through IT network automation, fostering optimized resource usage, slashing development time, instilling nimble security, and minimizing maintenance overhead. This made it easy to capitalize on market opportunities and significantly reduced costs, fueling investment in the strategic growth of the business.

We continue to collaborate with the client, helping the company achieve new speed and performance levels through well-organized, performant, and secure IT networks.